Waka Flocka Flame and Martha Stewart represent for a Pebble Beach family business.

The Weekly just ran a story this week on the launch of three children's books published by Pine Bros Charity Press, which was founded by Pebble Beach residents Rider McDowell and his wife Victoria. Rider is a former investigative reporter, and novelist who wrote the 1987 "tennis thriller" Wimbeldon and The Mercy Man. He and his wife also created Airborne dietary supplements.

But it's their other company, Pine Bros., the purveyors of lozenges that have offered "softish throat relief" since 1870, that gave their publishing imprint its namesake. And all proceeds from the sale of said books will go to the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital of Stanford, which cured their then-11-year-old son from brain cancer. A noble and happy ending.

But therein lies an interesting aside. About the lozenges. And rapper Waka Flocka Flame. McDowell made a TV commercial with the dreadlocked rapper that was banned this year by NBC and ABC for its allusion to marijuana or cigarette smoke, and for which the story of its banning made Rolling Stone, Time and the Washington Post, the latter of which encapsulated the incident with the headline "Waka Flocka Pine Bros. throat drops commercial is the best part of the [American Music Awards]."

"Pine Bros. has done it again," Emily Yahr of the Post wrote last month. "Just use a random celebrity to plug your cough drops and you can steal the attention away from any award show."

"This may or may not be the weirdest thing we’ve ever seen," wrote Kelly Lawler on USA Today's Entertain This! "Wacka Flocka Flame is in an ad for Pine Bros. cough drops because this, apparently, is the world we live in now."

Here is the spot that upstaged the AMAs and garnered Pine Bros. reams of free publicity.

It was such a nonsequitur that people had to check in on Twitter to make sure they had actually seen what they thought they had actually seen.

One bewitched person Tweeted: "Did anyone outside of the Atlanta viewing area just see a Wacka Flocka cough drop commercial or have I had too many glasses of wine?"

It wasn't the first time Pine Bros. had spun an odd celebrity commercial into a viral story with legs. Here's a spot they shot with Martha Stewart (after Liza Minelli dropped out the day of the shoot due to a reported breakdown).

As a bonus, here are the many takes in the making of a TV commercial the family produced themselves. It's maybe the funniest—definitely the most charming—one of them all.