Stepping lively on the streets of San Francisco

As to the city’s sidewalks being strewn with all sorts of organic and inorganic matter, pedestrian Bertie Brouhard notes that city officials seem to have more tolerance for “scooters being left — ah, abandoned — on our sidewalks than for the homeless.”

Bertie admits she’s “always disliked bikes on sidewalks” and was particularly distressed on a Friday walk at Crissy Field, where between the St. Francis Yacht Club and Fort Point, she saw several abandoned scooters on the trail. “Are they our new litter or parking problem solution? ... Who ya gonna call? Scooter-Busters?”

Meanwhile, after pondering the progression from car sharing to bike sharing to scooter sharing, Daniel Bergerac is proposing horse sharing. “Thankfully, Pony Express, a transportation disruptor, is on the way,” he emailed. Bergerac suggests the project begin by dispatching 200 horses, all over the city, to be located via GPS and lassoed anywhere.

“Because there are no traffic laws against horse riding our riders (we call them ‘jockeys’) are free to ride anywhere at any speed. Just imagine a galloping horse on a crowded sidewalk. That will give Grandma something to look out for! Great for keeping our seniors and disabled folk on their toes.

“Once a ride is completed, jockeys will replace the feed bag on the animal, lasso it to a street sign ... and just walk away . .... The horse waste will remind citizens of our proud history.”

P.S.: Tom Graham, who lives in Mendocino, was walking down a San Francisco street when his attention was drawn to a young woman in a BMW screaming and honking at a FedEx truck parked in her lane of traffic. She maneuvered her car around the truck, beeping all the while, and then “pulled into a Presidio Heights driveway three houses farther down the street . ... The FedEx truck pulled forward to double park in front of her home.” The delivery was for the impatient driver. In 1947, San Francisco lawyer Nat

Schmulowitz gave the San Francisco Public Library his collection of 93 humor books. Since then, the collection has grown to 23,000 items; once a year the Main Branch of the Library holds a curated exhibition. This year’s subject is “It Must Have Been Something I Ate,” and it includes a collection of “Poisson d’Avril” picture postcards, images created between 1905 and 1920, in which all sorts of people are pictured holding fish. You thought “off the wall” was a new concept? “Without humor,” wrote Schmulowitz, “we are doomed.”

Watching “RBG” at the Castro, where the SFFilm Festival screened the new documentary on Saturday, April 14, brought Schmulowitz’s observation to mind. It’s a terrific documentary, made by

Julie Cohen and Betsy West, both of whom received loud cheers from a packed audience of avid fans of the Supreme Court justice.

The filmmakers managed to portray Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brilliant work as a lawyer and a jurist, highlighting case by case the clarity of her thinking and her legal arguments. Her “light side” was evidenced in her love of opera and her ability to be friends with Antonin Scalia, whose view of the Constitution so differed from hers. But what I’ll remember best is an aside from her adult daughter. Ginsburg is so serious-minded, she said, that the family kept a log of times she laughed.

Although we’re a non-Netflix household and I’d never seen “The Crown,” I attended “Trying on the Crown,” the next day’s “master class” by film historian

David Thomson. British-born Thomson began by recalling going to his grandmother’s house — with neighbors invited in for the occasion — to watch the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, on a rented TV. Reception was spotty, he said, and as people moved across the room, the image on the screen drifted.

No such phenomenon in the current series, in which actress Claire Foy plays the queen, who in the clips we saw, is transformed from a rather dull member of a rather dull family into “a goddess-like figure.” Thomson’s talk, rooted in the TV series, flowered in his discussion of the monarchy, the British class system, and the effect of the former on the latter.

The use of the royals? Perhaps they are “calming,” he said. Recent political developments in the U.S. have been “exhausting,” he said. “Maybe we need dullness to hold onto.” Leah Garchik is open for business in San Francisco, (415) 777-8426. Email: lgarchik@ sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @leahgarchik