Mary Roach

She'll ban me.

So anyway, I was doing this story about osteoporosis.

You know, I was like, this isn't all that interesting.

What should I do to kind of punch it up?

And I thought, okay, I'll talk to an astronaut because, you know, you lose bone in space and it's something that astronauts have to deal with.

And if they discovered how to deal with it in space, we old ladies like me who are losing their bone could have a cure.

And so, okay.

So I'm on the phone with a guy and

He's like, it's an interesting conversation, but not really that interesting.

And we get to talking about other things.

And inevitably, with space, it comes around to, what's the toilet scenario?

He tells me that there's this, at NASA, kind of like a training potty.

It is a toilet with a camera down in the bowl facing up.

with a closed circuit TV next to the toilet showing you what that video camera is seeing.

So it's like this view of something you know very, very intimately, but you've never really seen it from that angle.

Yeah, yeah.

So it was kind of lodged in the back of my head.

And I'm like, someday I will write about that video toilet.

I will sit on that video toilet.

Fast forward many years now, I'm writing books, looking around for an idea.