Of Geese and Bakers

This was just a cool story in the CSM and I hadn't thought of being as goose as being awesome before, but I do now.This was from a study researching the flying habits of the bar-headed goose.

these birds change altitude as they traverse the Himalayas, hugging the mountainous terrain. By flying close to the ground as the mountainside rises and falls, their flight pattern resembles a roller coaster ride.

And I learned the word orographic which I'll never work into a sentence. My spell check doesn't even like it.

if you considered how much energy they expend flying upward, this sporadic and thrill-seeking flight technique might seem wasteful. This might be true, except for the fact that the migrating birds are aided by a phenomenon called orographic lift.

Orography is very cool.

“If a wind hits a mountain ridge in the ground or a large wave at sea, then some of it will be deflected upwards and create an updraft,” Bishop said. “A bird can use this to help it when climbing – it increases [the bird’s] rate of climb, reduces the energy required to climb at some rate, or a bit of both. When flying horizontally, it decreases the energy that needs to be supplied to the air to fly along.”

And a thank you to Mark Frost for running a photo of Joe and Peter Villa from 1980 in this week's Chronicle. I can't reproduce of link to that, but this is a link to a Saratogian article on the bakery I'd like to save.

Pete’s grandfather came to the U.S. from Italy in the late 19th century, landing in New York City like millions of other immigrants. For a brief time, he lived with relatives in Cohoes, a thriving industrial town whose mills provided labor for women in the family. Then he heard about a bakery for sale in Glens Falls and decided to take it over.

And while I'm on bakers, want to throw on this link to my neighbors in the Green Mountain state at Elmore Mountain Bread. 

Elmore Mountain Bread is a wood-fired micro-bakery, located in Elmore, Vermont. Our breads are carefully hand-crafted, hearth-baked in our wood-fired brick oven and feed our local community.

Long may Villa's live and bake in GF.