Degrees of Kelvin

Did you know when you refer to the temperature in kelvin you don't refer to it as degrees? And kelvin is always in lower case.
Here's a view that makes me even more unpopular than I am already but I quite like Kelvin MacKenzie. Actually, more than that, I credit him as one of the four most influential people in my working life. And that's more surprising than you realise considering he spent six years bollocking me when I worked for him and how much I disagree with so many of his views. He is also the only person I've ever met who called me clever and made it sound like an insult. But he gave me my break, kept faith in me when I went through a rough patch and taught me an awful lot about how this whole business works.
He did what every newspaper proprietor pays their editors to do and that is add readers. And he did this by understanding what they wanted better than any editor I know.
That's not to say he didn't get it wrong and on more than one occasion. And I'm not just talking about some of his ridiculous betting tips and his decision to change his allegiance from Millwall to Charlton. Unforgivable though that is.
He hired the best reporters (well I would say that), the best subs and some of the most ruthless Macchiavellian executives I've ever met but surrounded himself with yes men and women who never had the balls to stop Kelvin's gut instinct running away with him.
Hillsborough is probably the best example of this but there were others. I may blog on my experience of that period, during which I was a casual shiftworker at the paper throughout those few days.
But now Kelvin is transferring his disgraceful column (his words not mine) from The Sun to the Mail. And this, I think, is another mistake.
He doesn't have the same affinity with Mail readers as he did at the Current Bun. I know he's a columnist not an editor but speaking to middle aged, middle England and rabid expats is not the same as the aspirational working and lower middle class audience he has traditionally represented. He's no Littlejohn and I mean that in the nicest possible way to both of them.
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Two more examples of PR-speak hit my inbox today. First off is ideation which, I'm reliably informed, means the creation of an idea. Here's a bit of ideation. Why try and find new words when plenty of perfectly good old ones exist? The other is learnings. As in 'we can take the learnings and incorporate them into a working brief.' Or we could take whoever uses this kind of language and attach jump leads to their genitals until they speak proper like what I do.
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I'll say this for the Greek rioters captured on the BBC footage - they certainly don't need to protest about food shortages, looking at them. Think Stavros Flatley with a bandana over his face and holding a burning torch.
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Talking of protests, I wonder how many journalists had been told by newsdesks to monitor the public sector demonstrations desperate to find a teacher's placard with a spelling mistake or inappropriate apostrophe. But split infinitives are allowed.
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That girl who got kicked off The Apprentice this week...let's face it, you'd never go into business with anyone with those eyebrows.
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After yesterday's three examples, never trust anyone who....
*starts a sentence with 'I'm not racist but...'
*pretends to be Scottish (think men who wear kilts for weddings, Rod Stewart etc)
*calls their dog Tyson
Och aye the Jew....cheers, Solly