RIP - Flight 370

    The painting above is by a Uighur artist named Memetjan Abdullah.  He took part of a cultural exchange program recently, between China and Malaysia, titled "Chinese Dream : Red and Green Painting".

    When the show was over, Memetjan had the misfortune to board Flight 370 for the long trip back home to Beijing.  The flight that is still missing, but which pretty much certainly crashed into the South Indian Ocean.

    All too often, we think of airplane crash victims - especially foreign ones - as a group of nameless, faceless, featureless people for whom Kismet rolled an extremely unlucky Lot.

    But they're not an amorphous glump of humanity.  They were fathers, mothers, and in one case, a 5-year-old child.  They had loved ones who will grieve and die a little each day for the rest of their lives.  They had hopes, and they had dreams.  And for one Chinese/Uighur painter, a extremely promising artistic career