More than meets the eye as usual

So I saw this t-shirt in the window of Kenneth Cole (is that just a name or is he a real person?) on 42nd Street yesterday... with this statement on the front of it:

"In tough times, some land on their feet (others on the Hudson)" -- Kenneth Cole.

and I think, "well, isn't that a fine quotation..." and I go on my way, assuming that Mr. Cole is referring just to how some people do indeed land on their feet, whereas in tough times (I also misread slightly) the Mafia would be chucking some unlucky people IN the Hudson River.

But no: it seems the t-shirt is a money-spinner derived from that afternoon way back in January when the airplane miraculously and mercifully did not crash but crash-landed, safely, on the River Hudson. And Mr. Cole immediately put up a billboard, see below. Overpriced t-shirt followed in nanoseconds (probably).

So I was wrong, at first. But in fact I think my creative mis-reading makes the quotation both more relevant to this current economic crash and also timeless. Some lucky types always land on their feet... and most people who live in New York City will have at one time or another contemplated even briefly that there probably have been those less fortunate souls who ended up landing in the Hudson River, wearing the concrete boots of doom...

It being Easter weekend, I can't not quote the Bood Gook, in an unusual passage about luck, given how much of the Book is supposedly a revealing of God's plans, in which luck does not figure at all:

"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." -- Ecclesiastes 9, verse 11.

So even the greatest of athletes will still need to rely somewhat on a little bit of luck. And fortune will sometimes seem to make a supremely untalented, mediocre moron into United States President (yes, I'm still worked up about George W. Bush)... but was that his good luck or the world's bad luck?