Sam and I and the only other two guys we know who love action films went to see "Spider-man" on 42nd Street last week. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't as good, yadda yadda yadda, etc. Whatever.

Anyway, so this crane starts going wacky and smashing a steel girder into this skyscraper in midtown Manhattan and the sexy models doing an office photo shoot barely escape with their lives. Especially the cop's daughter. We get a bird's eye view of the building falling apart, the model sliding out the side of the building (the wall was gone), and the crane smashing out floors. And I'm having a minor 9/11 flashback.

I wasn't even in NYC at the time. I was away for a month after it happened. No one I knew, as far as I know, died on 9/11. And my pulse is doing the merengue while I'm watching Spidey save the girl. "It's supposed to do that," you're thinking. Oh really? And am I supposed to be thinking 911 911 911 while it's going on?

I guess they have to write falling buildings and highwire acts into the Spider-man movies. Otherwise, we don't get to watch the cartoon swinging from his thread. And who really wants to see Spider-man run anyway?

Except for a big cloud of sand causing major traffic havoc and the other two villains making a big mess while trying to kill Peter Parker, no other major destruction occurs during the movie. Do we New Yorkers really stand and watch while stone falls from the top of skyscrapers and cars fly through the air? I don't believe it. We are too practical and self-preserving to do that. (That's self-preserving by the way; not self-serving. Ask a New Yorker--a real New Yorker--how to get from A to B by train and you'll have 3-5 making sure you get the best route. Guaranteed. That's service, my friend. Not self-service.) (I always get all "yo" and "whaddyawant" when I talk about 9/11. Weird.)

So, yeah, I could live without NYC as a disaster site for a while. It hurts to see the buildings you pass every day be destroyed. It's enough once a year in the fall when the television "news" programs trot out the historic footage. Maybe that's why I keep going back to "Twister." Decimated barns, flattened drive-in movie screens and flying cows: now that's a movie.