Watch of the Third Variety

If you're a fan of Third Watch (9pm Fridays on your local NBC affiliate) I've got something for you to look out for during the rest of the season.

Living in New York you wander by TV shows and feature films shooting pretty frequently. Living in a sketchy area of Brooklyn it's less frequent. However, Sex in the City fans will recognize a tarted up version of my sketchy neighborhood as the neighborhood that Miranda moved to in the final season. Today it was Third Watch. I happened to be walking along Myrtle Avenue in time to see some stunt work going on.

So, sometime (probably soon since they weren't camouflaging the snow and frigid temps) when you see an older model maroon Volvo sedan ram into a hearse leading a funeral motorcade and land crunchingly in a random American made grey 4 door, that's like 4 blocks from my apartment. I'm walking up on the crowds of people standing around and I see a Volvo parked oddly and a man declaring it ready so I stopped. I mean, something was going to happen and I'm always in the mood to check out the inner workings of film and TV so I stopped. A couple of seconds later they put the motorcade in motion, started the Volvo and I'm thinking, "Hey, I bet this is going to be a crash." and then CRASH. Well really more Crash. They were going pretty slowly. But, as they warned you in Driver's Ed, even slowly you can cause some significant damage. The hearse spun around 180 degrees and the Volvo was imbedded well into the back seat of the 4 door. Very cool.

I would have stayed longer but, as I said, completely frigid (the weather, not me) and there was something on the street that was messing with the dog's paws enough to make her jump and twitch. So, I headed home to watch the finished product of such endeavors on my day off.

And it's what I saw then that makes me think how weird and random and a little bit awful it can be to live in a city this big with this much going on every single moment of every day.

Back behind me a few blocks there was a fairly significant non-fictional fire/rescue event going on. I saw at least 4 of the really big fire trucks with lights flashing. About a block past the fictional crash being filmed was the regular Myrtle Avenue traffic being held to wait for the go ahead from the TV people. In that block of cars was a fire rescue unit with lights flashing and siren politely turned off waiting to go and actually perhaps rescue people at the er, incident down the street.

I love New York!