Dear Log,
I have a soft spot for the Maldives, that little atoll off the coast of India. The folks there use a clever semi-Semitic writing system for their language, which I gladly wrote about in my Unidecode article. (The language itself, writing system aside, is closely related to Sinhala, which, back on the mainland, has another of my favorite scripts, Sinhalese script.)
The land in the Maldives is also just barely a skootch above sea level, so they're right in line for flooding as China and the US cook the ice caps in the name of greater juche.
So I expected that the place would be wiped off the map in this morning's tsunamis. But they sound sort of, uh, not totally destroyed! The tsunamis didn't exactly do wonderful things for the place -- it knocked out roads and whatnot, and put everybody's houses hip deep in water, but at least the news reports are of that, and not, say, corpses clogging the muddy streets or anything.
Meanwhile, a Christmas miracle here in SE Alaska: it stopped raining! First actual sunlight in at least two weeks. So things now look like this instead of like this.
BTW, Google Ads apparently likes to dynamically generate Voltairean levels of irony.
