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POPS The Object at Hand: His Majesty King Mongkut of Siam
It was there that royal emissaries found him one steamy April morning in 1851, when they brought the news that his half brother, King Rama III, was dead. Within days, the 47-year-old monk stepped from monastic life into the rich temptations and intricacies of the palace, with its inner city thronging with hundreds of women, its precincts patrolled by female guards and its life revolving entirely around his royal person. The holy man was now officially the "Lord of Life," the fourth ruler in Siam's Chakri dynasty, able to exert life-or-death control over some 5.5 million subjects. (As king, he banned the death penalty for monks who broke their vows of celibacy, putting them to work, instead, cutting grass for the royal elephants.) A spectacular coronation inaugurated the reign with great pomp. Brahmin priests sounded ceremonial conch shells. The new monarch, clad in golden robes, was carried off in a gilded palanquin. Even in that moment of glory, though,
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POPSThe Dinosaur Fossil Wars Ever since he had heard about a private collection going up for sale in the mid-1990s, Frithiof, now 61, had been hunting dinosaurs. "I'd thought fossils were things you could see only in museums," he says. "When I learned you could go out and find stuff like that, to keep or even to sell, it just lit a fire in my imagination. I studied every book I could, learned techniques of extraction. Fossils inspire a powerful curiosity."
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POPSON ALTERED IMAGES This is the winner of Smithsonian magazine's Altered Images category. A great effect that's reminiscent of the film "Dr. Cyclopes."
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POPSThe Web's Greatest Links Page Part I (Websites) I saw someone just post the name and the url but none of the sites that it links to, I thought I could do it a little more justice. These are not even a miniscule accounting of the Websites that this page links to. Truly something for everybody. The second part is web blogs...
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POPSIs Brijit the 'Thinking Man's Digg?' Arrington called Brijit the 'Thinking Man's Digg,' presumably because it culls stories from high-minded sources and provides short abstracts. Even if it's not all it's cracked-up to be, it still is a nice idea and could be a great source. Or, it could be yet another useless, boring social news site. We'll see...
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