We ate lunch at Smokey Bones the other day. It’s a pretty good lunch place, but it’s filled with TV’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, but it’s tough for a four or five year old to look away. 

That’s what happened the other day.

“Look, daddy! Look,” my four year old shouted and pointed. “It’s the white man group!”

Huh? What?

My wife and I shushed him. “You mean The Blue Man Group,” I said, loudly enough for all the neighboring tables to hear. We do, after all, live in Central Florida – 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.

“No, no! Not the Blue Man Group, the White Man Group! They are white!” He shouted.

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.

“I don’t see them,” I said. “Which one?”

He looked back and forth between the TVs, and then picked one. “That one!” He said, pointing to a TV playing a John McCain ad. “That one!”

Okay, so here’s my best guess about what happened. He must have seen an ad for a band that had bald white guys in it. Since he’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.

Either that – or he was making a political statement about John McCain.

In the interest of my own peace of mind, I’m gonna go with the first of these explanations.