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Jobs neck and neck with 'angry people' for Time award

And declared worthy successor to Lenin in Bulgaria...

Steve Jobs looks set to go head to head with "angry people" for Time magazine's Person of the Year, if a panel staged by the weekly news magazine yesterday is anything to go by.

However, Jobs has one major handicap in running for the role, as Time managing editor Rick Stengel pointed out: “We’ve never actually chosen a dead person."

Panellist and NBC anchor Brian Williams pointed out that in many areas, the US and the world had not advanced since WWII.

But, he waxed on, Jobs "gave us that spirit again that something was possible, that you could look at a piece of glass or plastic and move your finger..."

However, Williams, who like Jobs is part of the baby boomer generation, did not see his nomination backed by the youth on the panel.

Jesse Eisenberg, who doubles as last year's Man of the Year, Mark Zuckerberg, suggested that the likes of Occupy Wall Street and the masses that constituted the Arab Spring were more deserving of the cover spot on the magazine.

Seth Meyers, of Saturday Night Live fame, was even more succinct, saying "I do think Angry People are the Person of the Year, because I think they're right to be angry."

The perfectionist Apple boss was of course regularly angry, so perhaps that might offset his non-living status in the eyes of the panel.

Still, even if Jobs doesn't clinch the title – and really, why should he care – Saint Steve-ists might perhaps comfort themselves that a specialist electronics school in Bulgaria is pondering renaming itself after Jobs.

The institution was previously monikered after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, MacDaily reports.

However, while Lenin gave birth to a revolution that changed the course of world history, his efforts to create a closed, command economy ultimately failed – and he never invented the iPhone. Jobs scored on the latter, and arguably the former.

Neither Lenin or Jobs had any links to Bulgaria, though both men famously wore round glasses. ®

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