Shaving Yaks

[Carl Alexander]

I recently started hearing the phrase "shaving yaks" (and
related phrases) to describe what people are doing when
engaged in some tangential activity off the main course
of what they're actually working on. (For instance, a
hacker starting her first major C project in several years
who is currently engaged in hacking elisp because C mode has
just pissed her off one too many times is shaving a yak.
An extreme example arguably would be Knuth creating TeX
and metafont in order to be sure future volumes of The Art
of Computer Programming would be typeset appropriately.)

Several web search engines later, I've found a number of
uses of the phrase, mostly by obvious computer geeks, but
am no nearer to knowing it's *origin*. There has to be
a good story here. Anyone know what it is?

Thanks in advance!

[Data Vortex]

Carl Alexander <ca...@bronze.lcs.mit.edu> cried out:

> am no nearer to knowing it's *origin*. There has to be
> a good story here. Anyone know what it is?

I believe that there is, and while I don't know it, I know where you
should look.

There's a group of guys who run The Yak (www.theyak.net). Most notable of
them is a guy (friend of mine) named Strick. If you contact him
(str...@yak.net), I think he should be able to fill you in on the origins
here.

--
Data Vortex | Me, to my dad, speaking of my taste for hardcore
Just a guy | pornography: "That's nothing, it's not worth the
http://datavortex.com/ | three bucks. I think of Playboy the same way that I
| think of Newsweek."

[Robert Spelman]

Carl Alexander wrote:

> I recently started hearing the phrase "shaving yaks" (and related
> phrases) to describe what people are doing when engaged in some
> tangential activity off the main course of what they're actually

> working on....

>
> Several web search engines later, I've found a number of uses of the

> phrase, mostly by obvious computer geeks, but am no nearer to knowing

> it's *origin*. There has to be a good story here. Anyone know what
> it is?

Try finding the American cartoon, "Ren and Stimpy" from the very early
1990's. The show featured a stupid cat named Stimpy and his pal, a
high-strung Chiuauah named Ren. The cartoon was a cult hit among college
students and was often shown on MTV. One of the first-season episodes
involved a fictional holiday called "Yak-Shaving Day", in which Ren and
Stimpy would leave gifts for the Yak in hopes of getting the lather and
whiskers the Yak would leave behind after shaving it's face in their
bathroom. At the end of the bit, Stimpy has eaten the lather and
whiskers.

You had to see it. :)

How would yak-shaving in the above example relate to someone putting off
a project by working on something unrelated? It sounds like the person
in your example is doing something ENJOYABLE, unfortunately YAK-SHAVING
doesn't sound like much fun..

Robert