On Waiting Rooms, AI, and the History of Toilet Paper
Getting to the bottom ... of a very important topic.
Read It, Then Un-Read It! Music Produced by Suno AI. As for the lyrics? Nobody takes credit.
I’ve been on a summer hiatus… taking a writing class and working a lot.
But life keeps swirling around me: graduations, college adventures, funerals, new drivers, first office jobs. And also, friends and family have been collecting unfavorable health diagnoses faster than my grandson can collect his favorite Pokemon cards.
Welcome to the summer of 2025.
I’ll return shortly with something more substantial, but in the meanwhile, here is a topic that I think warrants the attention of anyone who has recently been sitting in a waiting room, hearing bad news, or looking up the definition of a new medical term on WebMD.
It’s a song about the history of one of our most essential modern bathroom products, and something you start to notice in college, when it doesn’t just magically replace itself on the holder.
It started while I was working on a fun little story with my granddaughter, who is headed to college. I was showing her how to use the "Deep Research" tools built into Grok, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
I wanted to show her before somebody else did, so I could point out ways not to use them.
(They’re cool, but they don’t replace learning how to do your own research. They're a good place to get an overview and some starting links, but trusting them completely would be like trusting your kid brother when he swears he hasn’t read your diary.)
Anyway, we were doing that and hey:
Why not run a report on the history of toilet paper?
Because we are silly people, and we were reminiscing about 2020.
I remembered how my mom always bought TP when it was on sale. She stashed it in every nook and cranny! If the 2020 shortages had happened on my mom’s watch, it wouldn't have bothered us a bit. She had enough pink and blue rolls to last for months.
Why is it all white now?
And didn’t the grandparents use something like the old Sears catalog in their outhouse? I heard something about that. So that’s what I asked Deep Research to find out.
The history is pretty wild.
Johnny Carson created a mini TP shortage in 1973 just by cracking a joke on his show. That was back when colored TP was popular, but it faded out because it was bad for plumbing, and I think people stopped looking at it as a decorator item.
And yes, the Sears catalog was good for the old outhouse days until sometime in the 1930s. That’s when Sears started using glossy paper, which really isn’t very absorbent. Fortunately, about that time, new paper rolls started coming out that were splinter-free. Amen. Hallelujah.
Let’s all raise our voices in praise of splinter-free!
So when we went to the Cancer Center yesterday, I thought I would work on this video while I waited. I had my script written from all these great facts. Before the Sears Catalog, there were, of course, the corn cobs you’ve probably heard about, and, well, smooth stones. Yup. That’s what the report says. I did check the sources.
But it was taking too long!
I was there while my family members were in talking to the doctor. Doctors are on the clock. They like to move you along! If they were in there this long, it could not be good news! And I thought, well, this lady likes jazz, knows about older times firsthand, and might enjoy some light-hearted fun when she gets out of that appointment.
So, after I paced for a while and visited the ladies’ room twice, I sat down, cranked up Suno, and started working on this song.
It’s a masterpiece, don’t you think? :)
I’m dedicating this to J & L. You know who you are.
Down with carcinoma and CIDP ... and up with jazz classics on the history of TP.
(Video will be out on Sunday.)
What has summer been like for you? Tell me about it down in the comments. Particularly if you researched something silly!
For more on Johnny’s joke, see this hilarious thread on X from RetroNewsNow:
https://twitter.com/RetroNewsNow/status/1075630887792984064
Oh, while I’m thinking about it, I haven’t been writing but I have put out a few videos, here they are, in case you’re a video person:
For the people who want to write some family stories but have put off starting because they don’t know how to make family trees. You don’t need a tree to get started. You can worry about that later.
Some ideas on how to get started. And a story about Natalie Goldberg and “Writing Down the Bones.”
A story about confidence. And don’t you love jello? (Me either.)
A fun way to use NotebookLM with your book notes. I used it to find my favorite writing exercise.
I wrote an article about this a while back, and then I thought, hey, let’s get my cousin Mark McGuffin and my youngest granddaughter in here and pull up an old letter from our great uncle.
Well you certainly DID get to the bottom of that one! Hysterical. Thank you for the fun. Go figure, Sears catalog paper changed it all. And I DO remember colored toilet paper. Huh. Who knew!
The Sears & Roebuck catalog in Grandma's outhouse made it into my memoir.
Entertaining and informative, Nancy!