This year, I should have expected nothing different. There is an old Jewish saying, "Man Plans, God Laughs.”

Welcome to the 21st century. Nothing has changed.

After a month of planning and promoting the relaunch of my radio show, for its third year debut, with Nikki Fried, Florida’s Agriculture Commissioner, as my first guest, the station got knocked off the air on Monday morning as Comcast went down, at five minutes to 12.

The new noon show is called "Talk of the Town,” featuring guests local and live, critically and casually sharing everything from the issues of the day to personal tales of their own lives.

There is always somebody out there that you know nothing about, whose story mirrors your own. The radio illuminates that experience.

There are things we think so intimately personal which we find out are universally most common. A talk show, like a community newspaper, airs that unique story.

Anyway, I will battle through the technological breakdown, and open next week with a slew of new guests, distinguished local journalists who have written and exposed stories from the pandemic to Parkland in the past few years.

Unfortunately, for all of us in business, Comcast is putting on its Fall Display of “Outages by Infinity,” sure to win an Emmy. My first week can now officially be called a crime scene. Where is the yellow tape?

As I began Wednesday’s show, introducing Steve Glassman, the former vice mayor of Fort Lauderdale, and our local gay city commissioner, Comcast again shut down, through no fault of the station itself. AT&T then followed suit.

Something is going on that someone is not telling us. Is it international hackers or corporate ineptitude? We need an investigative reporter like Bob Norman to expose it. He was my guest Tuesday, the only show I got on, barely.

Anyway, I am trying to laugh. What else can you do? Destiny has no marching orders. It just comes at you blindsided, and like adversity, you adapt, you adjust, and you scream a lot.

This is the 21st century and we scream often at the technology which we rely on hourly but fails us daily. One day we are taking off to the Moon, and minutes later, you are hearing about a plane crashing to Earth.

I have been adapting by ruminating weekly in SFGN. People like those columns. They are short, sweet, and to the point, like a tweet. We are a world moving away from textbooks that educate to Instagram posts that tantalize. We are a society that demands immediacy. We want patience, and we want it now!

This all started when Madison Avenue decided housewives did not want to cook for busy husbands and started making TV dinners in three minutes. Swanson’s is forever grateful.

Microwaves are the end result, even if we find out 10 years from now, they have been shooting off toxic brainwaves. There will be lawyers suing, I promise you that.

So Comcast takes a hit from Zeus, and your televisions don’t work for two hours. Try calling to complain you don’t have a signal. Good luck with that too. No internet? No Wi-Fi? Hope you have a dog to walk.

Waiting for Amazon to deliver that refrigerator you back-ordered? They can’t find drivers.

Waiting for that chip to fix the dashboard electronics on your BMW? Stuck in China.

Waiting too long for your favorite restaurant to bring out that special meal? They can’t find waiters.

Waiting for that check from the IRS or the state? They are months and millions of consumers behind processing accounts.

Tell me, please. What works anymore? Well, there is us. SFGN. Through the pandemic, we have been here week after week with the news, by your side, not with ads for mimosas, but with content that counts; which makes a difference in LGBT lives.

So yes, I wish I was on the air today, laying waste to our governor for appointing a Bahamian witch doctor to the position of Surgeon General of Florida.

I may have been the one who went for brain surgery in July, but it was Ron DeSantis who needed it more.

How can there be a culture war over vaccinations? From smallpox to rabies to tetanus to typhoid; from yellow fever to polio to measles, you get shots. My flu shot is next week. We didn’t start a culture war over that.

There is chickenpox, rubella, and mumps, too. Don’t forget those. Didn’t start an insurrection because doctors wanted to make people healthy.

“Life goes on,” we used to say.

Not America, not if we live in a country that tolerates 670,000 memorial flags at the Capitol because our citizens tolerated insurrectionists more than a pandemic.

It’s a new world out there, and we are becoming more and more like Nero, fiddling while Rome burns. In this case, it’s more than just our forests. It’s our nation.

It’s time to rise, and make your voice be heard. We will, on the pages of SFGN, and if Comcast allows, maybe on my radio show too.

One of those special voices in Representative Carlos Guillermo Smith, standing up to the governor’s refusal to list COVID deaths. His suit has traction, his cause is just, and his person will air on my show Friday at noon, tomorrow. If Comcast cooperates…