{"id":33272,"date":"2008-08-04T14:11:10","date_gmt":"2008-08-04T14:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2008\/08\/04\/quite-a-band\/"},"modified":"2008-08-04T14:11:10","modified_gmt":"2008-08-04T14:11:10","slug":"quite-a-band","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2008\/08\/04\/quite-a-band\/","title":{"rendered":"Quite a Band"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We ate lunch at Smokey Bones the other day. It&#8217;s a pretty good lunch place, but it&#8217;s filled with TV&#8217;s. Regardless of where you sit, you can see at least four different TVs. Usually, each of these is tuned to a different station.<\/p>\n<p>Adults can tune out the distractions easily enough,&nbsp;but it&#8217;s tough for a four or five year old to look away.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s what happened the other day.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Look, daddy! Look,&#8221; my four year old shouted and pointed. &#8220;It&#8217;s the white man group!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Huh? What?<\/p>\n<p>My wife and I shushed him. &#8220;You mean The Blue Man Group,&#8221; I said, loudly enough for all the neighboring tables to hear. We do, after all, live in Central Florida &#8211; and ads for The Blue Man group are pretty common. Also, we recently watched robots, which featured music by The Blue Man Group. So, they were on his mind.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;No, no! Not the <em>Blue Man Group<\/em>, the <em>White Man Group<\/em>! They are white!&#8221; He shouted.<\/p>\n<p>I shushed him again. We looked at the TVs he was facing. One was a sports show, one was Sponge Bob, and the other two were playing ads.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t see them,&#8221; I said. &#8220;Which one?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He looked back and forth between the TVs, and then picked one. &#8220;That one!&#8221; He said, pointing to a TV playing a John McCain ad. &#8220;That one!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Okay, so here&#8217;s my best guess about what happened. He must have seen an ad for a&nbsp;band that had bald white guys in it. Since he&#8217;s been thinking about The Blue Man Group lately, he assumed they were called The White Man Group. Then the ad switched off before my wife and I looked, and he pointed at the TV where the ad had been.<\/p>\n<p>Either that &#8211;&nbsp;or he was making a political statement about John McCain.<\/p>\n<p>In the interest of my own peace of mind, I&#8217;m gonna go with the first of these explanations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We ate lunch at Smokey Bones the other day. It&#8217;s a pretty good lunch place, but it&#8217;s filled with TV&#8217;s. Regardless of where you sit, you can see at least four different TVs. Usually, each of these is tuned to a different station. Adults can tune out the distractions easily enough,&nbsp;but it&#8217;s tough for a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8EE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}