Author and thinker Clay Shirky explored the notion and others in his tome, “Here Comes Everyone: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” in which he observed “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring … It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.” Um, well, we’ll see, Clay. This is what happened on Tuesday: Pursuant to a query I posted on Facebook, “Taking requests for my column this week. What’s on your mind, Sonoma?” the first 20 minutes yielded a pitch for cheese by a cheesemaker, the namedrop of a theater production from the dramaturge and an inquiry regarding an exceptional bottle of sparkling I was to deliver to sommelier pal Christopher Sawyer on the occasion of his 40th birthday on behalf of the inquirer, who simply posted “Pol Roger.”

Later a wine guy mused on “the Renaissance of supple ‘balanced’ pinot noirs to the Russian River Valley and the death of over-blown ‘hot rod’ wines …” A woman from the old Lumaville scene simply posted “deconstruction,” philosopher Jacques Derrida’s approach to textual analysis, a notion big in the ’90s and preceded by the once vogue terms “post-modern” and “existential,” which mysteriously evaporated from cafe conversations like the steam of a Venti latte, if you know what I mean. Another Luman lamented the unavailability of my column since she moved from Sonoma, despite the fact that it’s online, every week at sonomanews.com (with a reprise on DHowell.com). Oh, and you can always subscribe but I guess that’s so Web 1.0.

The Facebook stew was simmering. Now I needed it to boil over into quotes, which I could cut-and-paste to make my word count. I posted, “Brilliant. So far so good. Now send me quotes, which I can attribute to you …”

Bobo de Albo suggested I opine on “taco truck overkill” and offered the quote, “It’s overkill.” Thanks for contracting “it is” to “it’s,” Bobo, big help on the word count. Steve Meloan bemoaned “The dearth of places in Sonoma for kids to run around during the rainy months and the boiling hot months. Why isn’t there a bowling alley, indoor rock climbing, indoor pool, indoor soccer, etc?” The wine guy, Robert Conard, jumped in with some suggestions, but alas, they weren’t Valley-specific, which led Sharna Haver to lament “Are we too good for a bowling alley …”

Apparently, yes — yes, we are too good for a bowling alley if we accept that we are indeed “good” and the empirical fact that there is no bowling alley.

The I-T’s own J.M. Berry reflected that we once had a bowling alley and, should it return, he nominated Emmy Kaplan of Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack to run the lounge. Kaplan could not be reached for comment until 12 hours later. She apparently ignored Berry’s career advice (smart) and posted her suggestion that I write about “how everybody complains that there is nothing to do and then when there is something to do they make an excuse.” Charissa Drengsen capped the conversation with “the state of the arts in public schools … (are) there any?” Yes, Charissa, there’s a blossoming graffiti program.

OK, Sonoma, from what I can glean from your Facebook commentary, Emmy should install a bowling alley,  a pool full of Russian River Valley pinot noir and climbing-wall covered with graffiti, which everyone will complain about — especially when the taco truck arrives.

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Let’s raise a glass to celebrate the recent discovery that the world’s supply of functional Twitter puns has finally run dry. Twee what I mean?

Wired Sonoma invites you to a Tweetup, beginning at 5 p.m. today at the offices of ClickMarkets and DHowell Media Group, 538 Broadway, Suite B, Sonoma.

Wine will flow – courtesy of sponsor Gloria Ferrer, who will have you know that it makes more than the sparkling darlings for which its widely known. To wit, its splendid 2006 Carneros Pinot Noir will be on hand. Ditto its bubblicious Va de Vi.

Special thanks to Gloria’s Eva Bertran and Julien Gervreau of to Marie Gerwirtz Public Relations.

@WiredSonoma @ClickMarkets @DHowellcom @GloriaFerrer #wstwup

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The low turnout baffles my wife who thrills at the sight of little one’s garbed as ghouls, scampering willy-nilly over the landscaping. But I know why we yearly loose a handful of trick-or-treaters. It’s not because they’re matriculating into more mature activities like egging cars or strafing houses with toilet paper. It’s because my wife is the brand manager of a natural foods company and subsequently loads up the kids’ sundry pillowcases, plastic jack-o-lanterns and the occasional Timbuktu bag with “healthy” snacks from her company. I can already hear the sigh(s) of disappointment. Halloween is the one time of year kids are permitted to take candy from strangers and my wife has to go on her one-women crusade to prevent cavities and childhood diabetes. What a witch.

I know, I know – kids should be so lucky. Back in my day, the healthy stuff was where the loonies did their dirty work. Remember the apple chock full of razor blades shown in X-ray on the evening news?

Those were the days, when madmen tried to kill you outright whilst the Mad Men sold us confectionary poisons that would take years to lethally clog our systems.

Then there was the Red No. 2 scare of 1976. Otherwise known as “amaranth,” the food dye was banned that year once it became apparent that it was a carcinogen. Thereafter, we had to get our red M&Ms on the black market of the schoolyard blacktop. Ironic that the dye, named for an imaginary, immortal flower referenced by Milton in “Paradise Lost” (Immortal amaranth, a flower which once / In paradise, fast by the tree of life…) was a suspected killer.

And to think that rock group Van Halen had a rider in its contract prohibiting brown M&Ms. Their lawyer must have been color blind.

A way to avoid M&Ms of all shades on the cheap is to window shop for one’s heebie jeebies. With my infant son, the Cannoli, strapped to me in his Bjorn, I sneaked a peek at the Sebastiani Theatre lobby which is presently in full Halloween regalia in honor of the resurrection of Witchie-Poo, the annual spectacle of spooks.

As I fogged the glass door, squinting at the entry strewn with cotton cob webs and other frights of blight, the four-month-old Cannoli expressed his approval by attempting to French kiss the glass, having just discovered his tongue, which remains too slippery for him to catch with his cocktail wiener fingers. Interestingly, if you say “horror house” while holding your tongue, “trick-or-treat” takes on a markedly different meaning.

Likewise, I’m advised by an informant that the foyer of Dr. Forsythe’s office is also done up in Halloween hues. The Cannoli and I never made it far enough down Broadway to visit (we were waylaid by a pit stop at my office, which, being a burgeoning media empire, is also a 700-square-foot diaper changing station). Consequently, I’m unsure if Forsythe’s deathly decor recalls a pet cemetery, in which case methinks the pet reaper should spell his name “For-scythe.”

And that, darling readers, is why they pay me the big bucks.

Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack has also apparently undergone a Transylvanian transformation in time, I suppose, for its namesake restaurateur to cameo as a latter day Elvira when she hosts Sonoma Drive-In’s broadcast of “White Zombie” at 10 p.m., Saturday night on local Comcast channel 27 (hooray for educational programming).

Incidentally, White Zombie is also the name of a metal act which had a rider in its contract excluding all M&Ms except green ones, which allegedly have aphrodisiacal properties.

I, of course, will be home on Halloween night vainly attempting to distribute health food while slipping green M&Ms to my wife.

Trick or treat? Yes.

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This was during the second, “classic” wave of classic zombie flicks, produced by George Romero and his imitators, including “Day of the Dead,” which was released on my 13th birthday (though my first – and favorite – zombie film was “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things,” a low-budget depiction of an insufferably pretentious theater troupe whose black magic shenanigans raise the dead with predictable results). Now, nearly a quarter century later, I find myself again surrounded by cemeteries and cinemas full of the undead. My office is situated between three cemeteries separated by mere blocks and – gasp! – it’s on a second floor. When the zombie apocalypse occurs and lurching hordes of re-animated corpses come knocking, however, I’ll be prepared.

The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks offers comic advice (his forthcoming graphic novel The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, is due out from Random House this October). Ditto last year’s Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead by Jonathan Maberry, but it’s recently released study “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modeling of An Outbreak of Zombie Infection,” penned by Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Imad and Robert J. Smith of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Carleton University, that backs its plan for staving off a “doomsday scenario” with real, albeit, weird science.

From the paper’s abstract: “…We model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.”

Okay, now I feel better. This paper, of course, comes from an institution of higher learning that bills itself as “Canada’s Capital University” (I don’t feel so bad about SF State anymore – though I do believe one could minor in vampirism there).

Spend a couple of years in Sonoma and one comes to appreciate the seasonality of the Valley’s aromatic experience. Every fall, the air becomes pungent with the fragrance of grapes rent by an Armbruster RotoVibe destemmer (which sounds like it belongs in a horror film).

This musty perfume still lingered in my nostrils when I opened my office window and was met with the fearsome reek of death. It emanated from the second story window across the alley from me, which had been opened in a vain attempt to aerate the place. When I went to investigate, the police present on the ground floor outside the building were polite but couldn’t share details.

Their doleful eyes, however, indicated that Halloween had come early to the complex. The stench wasn’t some over-inquisitive rodent selected-out of the gene pool by a Darwinian drainpipe, but rather a human corpse in such a state of decomposition as to suggest it hadn’t many visitors in the previous weeks.

Needless to say, my officemates and I were well-rattled – not by this foreshadowing of Zombiegeddon that had arrived in a heap of decayed flesh not more than 15 feet away from our place of business – but by the fact someone’s last thoughts, last words and breath went unheard, in the dark and solitude of a one-bedroom apartment, and no one noticed for weeks.

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