The gee-whiz! page — Cats: Why they rule our world
By O. E. MacDougal
Issue #170 • March/April, 2018
House cats
A recent Gallup poll showed that cat ownership is pretty much evenly distributed between men and women, and that roughly 34 percent of all U.S. homes...
Gee-Whiz: From Paper to Canning
By John Silveira (aka O.E. MacDougal)
May/June 2017 Backwoods Home
The greatest inventions in history are the ones we now take for granted. Fire and the wheel-axle combination are among them. If we weren’t taught in...
Avian Flu — How afraid of this
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Avian Flu
How afraid of this chicken should you be?
By John Silveira
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Issue #97 • January/February, 2006
There's been a lot of talk in the mass media recently about Avian flu, also known as Bird flu and...
Gee-Whiz: Alcohol
By O.E. MacDougal
Backwoods Home
Did early man first cultivate grains just to get drunk?
The brewing of beer is older than civilization and goes back at least 9,000, and perhaps more than 12,000, years. Evidence of...
The coming ice age
By John Silveira
Issue #139 • January/February, 2013
I'm putting my apocalyptic ice age novel, Danielle Kidnapped, on Amazon's Kindle and also producing a paperback version on Amazon's website. (See the ad on page 65.) The...
A brief history of health and medicine
By John Silveira
Issue #100 • July/August, 2006
As little as a century ago, the average life span in the United States was 49 years. Today it is 77. Fifty years ago, the average life span...
Can we make a Tyrannosaurus rex from a chicken?
By John Silveira
Issue #169 • January/February, 2018
Do you have chickens, ducks, turkeys, or geese in your yard? They’re not “just birds” because scientists now realize birds are dinosaurs. Real dinosaurs! For 150 million years,...
A doomsday scenario to sleep on
By John Silveira
Issue #109 • January/February, 2008
I once wrote a science fiction novel that I never tried to sell. Titled The Perfect Defense, its first chapter appeared in the premier issue of BHM in...
The world is ending! … Again?
By John Silveira
Issue #85 • January/February, 2004
People love to talk about scary stuff. Especially when it's end-of-the-world scary, such as the big asteroid recently in the news that was supposed to hit Earth and...
The coming ice age
By John Silveira
Issue #86 • March/April, 2004
As little as 30 years ago the talk wasn't about global warming, it was about an imminent ice age. Is an ice age likely? Even possible? Consider this:...
Three more ways the world can end … and I’m not kidding
By John Silveira
Issue #155 • September/October, 2015
"What are you doing?" a voice asked.
I looked up and saw O.E. MacDougal, Dave's poker-playing friend from Southern California, and he's now my friend, too. Accompanying him was...
How big is the solar system?
By John Silveira
Issue #60 • November/December, 1999
In artists' renderings of the solar system we often see the sun represented by a small sphere with the planets drawn fairly close by. In truth, drawings like...
The threat of electromagnetic pulse!
By John Silveira
Issue #132 • November/December, 2011
I like "doomsday" scenarios even ridiculous ones, such as the supposed Mayan calendar prophecy for 2012 or what had been Y2K doom-and-gloom leading up to the year...
The ‘risks’ with Swine Flu
By John Silveira
Issue #118 • July/August, 2009
Do we have anything to worry about the reemergence of Swine Flu Novel Influenza A (H1N1) this fall? The short answer is: Probably not. There are...
Gee-Whiz: Insects
By O. E. MacDougal
November/December 2015, Backwoods Home
Some 400 million years ago, in the Devonian Period, insects evolved from crustaceans. Since that time, they have been one of the most successful life forms on the...
Testing Soil
By Tom Kovach
Issue #119 • September/October, 2009
Testing the soil content of a garden is very important and is quite easy to do. Soil tests are needed because some plants prefer slightly acidic soil, while...
