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Creative Columns 21

Origin of the Napkin


Once upon a time, in
a place far from here (a location worth three armies when fully occupied at a game called Risk) there was a man sitting by a fire. Suddenly, as if lightning had struck him, he jumped up. “Oe-mie-gohd!” he shouted (native dialect for “I have
an idea!”).

“Oe-mie-gohd!” he shouted…”

Just at the exact moment when he wanted to open his mouth and tell his friends about his wonderful invention, something hit his head and blackness engulfed his vision.

When he came by his wife was standing over him with a rock in her hand shouting: “Ge-Ah-Johb!” (which in native dialect means: “Get off your lazy ass you no good excuse for a husband and feed our children with some food!”).

“Get off your lazy ass you no good excuse for a husband…”

After having taken care of the primary needs, the man got back to his thinking. Although he could not remember his earlier light-bulb-
above-the-head moment, he now had a new goal: how to communicate his ideas to his friends without his wife bothering him every minute for food.

Judging from the title, you will most likely know the solution to man’s problem. So I won’t bore you with the details. Yes, this man invented the napkin. Yes, this man invented the napkin before the pencil. But they had charcoal, so that innovation probably wasn’t that far behind.

So now you know how the napkin came to be. And the man? He became famous for one of his other inventions, the wheel.

Jan van der Asdonk

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