Please please tell me know, is there something I should know?
This morning I stopped by Albertsons to buy a paper (to read the mayoral election results) and to buy a bottle from the liquor section (OK, so it was a bottle of club soda).
After I made my purchase, I was presented with some coupons. Now one would assume that really big companies are smart enough to give you coupons that you would actually use. I have one of those saver thingies with Albertson's, so presumably they are capable of recording my past purchases and offering me coupons based upon those, as well as my present purchase.
So why did I get a coupon for Pampers Training Pants?
My daughter is a teenager and therefore too old for such garments, and I am still too young for these.
Does Albertsons hope that I'll suddenly adopt a toddler and run back to Bert's and buy the Pampers?
Well, at least the other product is something that I could conceivably use. It's been around for a while, as witnessed by this direct quote from a Saturday Night Live sketch from 1976. In this sketch, John Belushi, playing Captain James T. Kirk, said the following:
Promise.
I'm sure this mystifies people of younger generations when they see this sketch.
But perhaps I imagined the whole thing. This transcript of the sketch doesn't include the line.
I take that back; it appears in this transcript.
For those who are still scratching their heads, I offer this:
The Encyclopedia Shatnerica is a comprehensive book that examines, in minute and often tongue-in-cheek detail, every aspect of the Shatner's public and private persona....Schnakenberg does a superb job digging up Shatner minutiae, shedding light on long-forgotten appearances such as Shatner's stint as the Promise margarine spokesperson in the mid-1970s and as the star of the short-lived 1975-76 Western series The Barbary Coast.
It turns out that the Promise commercial reprised an earlier Shatner TV role:
The Outer Limits: Cold Hands, Warm Heart (1963)....
Venus Held Me In Her Arms!, March 29, 2002
Reviewer: Bruce Rux (Aurora, CO)
This was Shatner's first famously hammy performance, playing Colonel Jeff Barton, the first astronaut to Venus and back....Turns out he met something on Venus, during the eight minute telemetry loss the mission had when he went under cloud cover. He's only now beginning to remember what...
Should have been a winner. Falters due to an unintentionally comedic, melodramatic script, and the actors' obvious discomfort at having to speak such soap-opera lines. It's additionally funny today for reasons the production team could not have predicted: the manned Mars mission Shatner's character tries to sell for NASA after his Venus flight is named "Project Vulcan," prefiguring Star Trek, and at one point he makes a vow to his wife by solemnly lifting his hand and saying, "Promise!" which he did identically, years later, in T.V. promotions for Promise Margarine....
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