´óÏó´«Ã½

A celebration of the riches of the web.

Web Monitor finds an unlikely style icon, unlikelier wrestling fan and the most unlikely technophobe. Share your favourite bits of the internet by sending a link via the letters box.

• Colonel Gaddafi has been popping around the news headlines of late, and so has the New York Fashion week. Vanity Fair has put these together and come up with Dictator Chic. In , the magazine admires how his style has become more unusual over time:

"Early Gaddafi, in the elegantly tailored tunic of a military butcher, before he learned the fine art of accessorizing with maps of Africa and photos of dead people."

• The former chief of staff to Senator John McCain, Mark Salter, says manners seem to have been forgotten in US politics recently and considers a dramatic career change to wrestling. Salter's and was a must read:

"I despair of the coarsening of our politics and our broader culture. So much so that after a lifetime in politics I'm beginning to think I might have rendered more honorable service to humanity had I worked in professional wrestling."

• Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, revealed at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit that he could have averted the financial crisis if only he would have known how to access his voicemail. that Barclays Capital wanted to use Buffet's money to bail out Lehman Brothers. But Buffet didn't know the details because they had been left in a message on his voicemail:

"It was all too complicated for Buffett to take in, in a quick phone call, so he asked Diamond [Bob Diamond, the head of Barclays Capital] to fax him the details. Buffett got back to his hotel room around midnight and was surprised to find... nothing. Lehman went under, and within days, the world was in a full-blown financial crisis.

Fast forward 10 months. Buffett, who admits he never has really learned the basics of his cell phone, asked his daughter Susan about a little indicator he had noticed on the screen: 'Can you figure out what's on there?' It turned out to be the message from Diamond that he had been waiting for that night... I caught up with Buffett afterward, and asked him whether, in retrospect, he might have gone for the deal. He pulled the simple little Samsung phone out of his pocket and pondered it for a moment. It's entirely possible, he suggested. 'I don't know.'"

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?