Background To 'My Life As A Yak'

Having students in English is a great thing, as you can often get creative bursts while preparing their lessons and notes. This is inevitable when you have to prepare texts for punctuation and spelling correction exercises. One moment you're thinking about what to write, and then suddenly the proofreading passage has a title: 'My Life As A Yak', and something weird scrawls out beneath it. It may not be particularly good, but it's always at least interesting, and on this occasion will form the basis for the next post of the Quirky Muffin. It's a nice feeling that ensues when something daft pops out of the mind!

What does it mean, 'My Life As A Yak'? It's mightily complicated, and involves several balls of yarn, and a trip to the wrong dentist, as well as reincarnation from a wooden leg salesman into fairy flowers. All at once? Well, some of those bits may not make it into the final version, although the real world phenomena of yak-skiing and yak polo might. Yes, you read that correctly, there is such a thing as yak polo in the world! The world outside of the United Kingdom has some very different things going on it.

There are several things you might not know about yaks, but perhaps the most interesting one to me is that yaks will not eat grain, opting exclusively for growing green grass. As a result, yaks can not be migrated over deserts and wastelands, meaning they're only found in central Asia, where they are then used for nominal beast of burden work, for milk and dairy, and for... polo? Apparently, the central Asians have taken to the yak theme for attracting tourists, which is alarming. What else could be yak themed? They already have polo, skiing, racing and all the agriculture. What about yak dancing, where the dancers have to do their best to imitate yak patterns? Or yak Buddhism, a doubly local tradition of meditating exclusively with the friendly creatures?

There must be much more to write about with regards to yaks. Does anyone else have any ideas? Which aren't about yak carousels? Mwahahahaha.

O.