Authors - how do you find all these little nuggets?

By coincidence, the current issue of SILVER SURFER involves a character having to use "the facilities" on an alien world. Complications ensue.

 

This is the kind of scene I was talking about. I'm a big NCIS fan, and they're always having conversations in the men's room. We've also gotten plenty of scenes in movies and shows of someone on the run ducking into the bathroom to hide.

 

Mmph. Thought I hit the quote button before replying. So it's a copy/paste instead.

Or the bathroom just happens to be the location of the best window for spying n the building across the street.

 

There's also the cliche of somebody bad-mouthing another someone, who then emerges from the stall . . .

Or, along the same lines, the person in the stall who overhears something they weren't supposed to.

 

@T'Ressa Dax with this new software, clicking reply automatically quotes the post your replying on. If you click quote it operates as a multi-quote, and to get those to appear in your reply you need to click the "insert Quotes" button.

It's weirdly backwards to the old software, but I'm slowly getting used to it

 

Hmm. Bathrooms were central to several major plot elements in Hidden Figures. And it's not all that uncommon to have bathroom scenes.

I seem to recall there being a joke about multi-species adaptive facilities in ADF's (non-Trek, non-Humanx, non-Spellsinger, non-movie) Glory Lane (I can't recall a single example of a more perfect match between a book and its cover painting, BTW).

And of course, we mustn't forget Kubrick's rather well-known bathroom scene, and this:

Zero Gravity Toilet Instructions From "2001" by Eric Williams, on Flickr

Still not entirely sure what a "dalkron eliminator" is, though.

 

That just proves how effective it was at eliminating all the dalkrons.

 

I have, however, assumed that "dalkron" was a euphemism for feces. (Anybody else remember the late Gilda Radner's "Emily Litella" bit about "endangered feces"?)

 

Thanks. For some reason, I didn't notice, and the post I was replying to seemed to have disappeared.

 

One of Kevin Killiany's Strange New Worlds stories ("Indomitable," in volume 7) has a short scene where a naked Chekov has a conversation with Khan in the communal shower.

 

Somebody's been watching Designated Survivor, I see. Only in that case, it worked out rather well for the "offender". Points for honesty and a new job...

 

I've actually never seen that show, but it's a pretty common cliche. It's basically a variation on the old "He's standing right behind me, isn't he?" gag.

It's actually kinda surprising that I can't immediately think of an example from STAR TREK.

 

A la NCIS. Gibbs does that a lot.

 

Kirk behind Spock at the end of "Amok Time" comes kinda sorta close.

Ally McBeal, as one example, employed the stall gag on way too many occasions to count.

 

I think you mean "waste extraction".

 

Applied to "the necessary," that sounds painful.

 

Based on my very limited experience (especially compared to some of the other participants in this thread), I have a lot of random bits of trivia bouncing around in my head from browsing the Encyclopedia, Memory Alpha, Ex Astris Scientia, etc. and from, more importantly, watching the episodes and movies over and over and over again. Most of the references listed in my annotations came from that.

But probably 1/4 of my references came from knowing that I needed to stick something in the text (whether it was the name of a crew member or a type of flower or the name of a penal colony) and then doing the research to find one that fit into the existing continuity rather than making one up. (Especially since I was writing a Voyager story, and the crew roster for that ship is already pretty full without making up new crew members.) In some cases that research reminded me of details that wouldn't occur to me otherwise, such as a backstory or a pattern I hadn't previously noticed, which helped add to the flavor.

In the end, this resulted in a short story with a couple of dozen references to the various shows and movies. Probably a little over-packed if anything, but I figured better too many references for a 50th anniversary story than too few (as long as they weren't forced in awkwardly).

 

Nothing comes to mind for me, either.

I like making things up. But yeah, including a nod to something that's already been done works too.