A big bang-up accident just happened outside my window. Living seven floors above Broadway, all I heard was the screech of a set of brakes and then a rapid-fire series of huge crunches. A BMW 5 series is impaled into a Lincoln Towncar at a right angle; the Towncar is askew in a parallel parking place, and the BMW is awkwardly sticking out across two northbound lanes of Broadway, xenon headlights reflecting weakly around the edges of the hole it has made in the door of its target. A BMW 3 series is sitting in the middle of the intersection at 100th Street, its entire front end sagging and demolished into little, shiny, metallic bits that are now spread across the road. People are wandering around all three cars, seemingly content that nobody is injured and moving the larger projectiles out of oncoming traffic. And, as always, the cars that are backed up are honking and honking and honking, oblivious to the cause of their delay, anxious to get on with their commute home.