Titanium Lining

In the consideration of the scope of disasters like Indonesia's tsunami on December 26 of this year, it's oddly comforting to think about unexpected effects of such upheaval and rearrangement of elements.

The tsunami "brought India a macabre windfall: tons of titanium ore, worth untold millions of dollars, deposited along more than 300 miles of shoreline."

Also, the storm uncovered, briefly, the ruins of an ancient Indian temple. Said a local: ``My grandfathers said there was a port here once and a temple, but suddenly we could see it was real, we could see that something was out there.''

There's something profound to be gleaned from this, something about cycles of birth and rebirth, some parallel to the eternal process of creation and destruction in the universe, and the life cycle of stars. But for now it's just sad.