Some perilous days in the neighborhoods

A Menlo Park woman wrote a Nextdoor post expressing her pain and horror upon being stung three times by wasps in a public park. “I yelled out in pain and fell to my knees ... But no one came up to me to help . ... I was so scared, I didn’t want to move . ... I had my husband go and tell the police station what happened so that this does not happen to anyone else.”

Further down — a day or so earlier — in that neighborhood’s Nextdoor postings, someone who’d taken a picture of a backyard snake asked for help identifying it. One respondent wrote that he thought it was a harmless gopher snake.

And a woman was moved to write, “We share the earth with other beings. They were here first. We have encroached on their home.” That was the same woman who complained shortly thereafter about having been stung by the wasps.

Noe Valley neighbors were surprised when Mayor-elect London Breed and state Sen. Scott Wiener dropped in at the Laidley Street Fourth of July Block Party and Parade. After someone wearing a “forefather” costume read parts of the Declaration of Independence, reports Candace Forest, the elected officials “gave short, inspiring speeches.”

Who says old-fashioned patriotism is passe? The Piedmont Fourth of July Parade program listed among its participants the Daughters of the Armenian Revolution. Dan Wohlfeiler says, however, that there was nary an Armenian Revolutionary to be seen, “just a small group of cheering women from the other DAR, waving from their car.” The Daughters of the American Revolution got lots of cheers.

Also on the Fourth, Roseann Galvan reports, the annual tug-of-war between Bolinas and Stinson Beach was dominated by “the gritty Bolinas team,” which won in both men’s and women’s pulls. “Maybe the liberal base is really getting energized,” she says, but I’m guessing the liberal base is alive and well in Stinson, too.

And waiting in line at the Palo Alto Chili cook-off, Janice Hough got some July Fourth education. “Fireworking,” she says, “is now a verb. As in, ‘Who are you fireworking with tonight?’ ” (The speaker’s high school English teacher might be OK with the coinage, but not the grammar: “With whom are you fireworking tonight?”)

San Francisco Travel has expanded its “I Am San Francisco and You Are Always Welcome” promotion to include nine profiles of a diverse group of San Franciscans. The initiative was first launched, said president and CEO Joe D’Alessandro, because “We wanted to distance ourselves from the rhetoric coming out of the capital.”

SF Travel’s explanatory materials about the the project say the profiles “cover a diverse human landscape of race, gender, age, economics and orientation, including a cable car grip man, a Summer of Love historian, a Muslim tech worker, female entrepreneurs/pop-up chefs, executives, artists, a transgender person, etc.” I think the residents most tourists have expressed such distress about are the “etc.”

Memo to SF Travel: To get specific (and picky), bravo for a profile of Dennis McNally, rock historian and biographer of Jack Kerouac and of the Grateful Dead. But is it really necessary, in 2018, to describe someone as a “female entrepreneur”? Signed, Friendly Female Journalist.

I was saddened to read on the Eater San Francisco site of the death of Anthony Nguyen, 36, manager of the Tu Lan restaurant, owned by his family. What had caught my eye, at first, was the name of the restaurant, a familiar and favorite place near The Chronicle, and then, the picture of Nguyen.

Lunchtime, he’d usually be just inside the front door, distributing takeout packages, accepting payment, and if he knew you, rounding the coins off the bill. Walking on Sixth Street isn’t exactly strolling around Union Square. He made his patrons feel at ease on this sometimes off-putting stretch of sidewalk. When I drove up Sixth Street in late afternoon, the restaurant was quieter, and I’d see him standing in the doorway, looking out into the street, greeting passersby.

Last week, when I walked over to express condolences, there was a sign in the window that the place would be closed, due to “bereavement,” until July 5.

As familiar as was my standard tofu salad lunch, as familiar and amiable as were the greetings between us, I didn’t know Anthony Nguyen’s name until I read of his death. I regret that.

“This is Berkeley. We don’t play Monopoly. We play antiMonopoly here.” Woman to cashier, overheard at Safeway by Jim Hynes