Nifty teens; Petrified priests; More property corruption; & The Devil's Grain again.

Britain doesn't do well in the OECD Pisa education tests. And neither does Spain. But along have come tests to check on teenagers' ability to solve problems in unfamiliar circumstance (no, I don't know how either). And Britain does rather well in these. Spain, though, doesn't - coming well down the table and falling behind Portugal, Slovakia and Poland. One wonders why. Is it because British teenagers leave home early and never go back, whereas Spanish youngsters tend to stay longer at home - even when at university - and have everything done for them by the family matriarch(s).

With priests like this . . . A Polish RC prelate has warned his flock that Lego is a tool of Satan that can destroy children's souls. The figures, he insists, "are about darkness and the world of death.". I wonder where Pope Frankie stands on exorcism of plastic pieces. Or "dark monsters" as the priest prefers to call them. Conceivably, though, the Pope is too busy trying to figure out whether the latest Holy Grail is, in fact, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper. As if. Which reminds me - If there are enough splinters of wood around the Catholic world to make several True Crosses, how come we never hear of the True Table used at the Last Supper? Or even the True Christ's Chair, which would have been a lot easier to take away and hide pending the rise in price of holy splinters.

Spain's reputation as a Catholic country with pre-Christian levels of corruption is being enhanced by the case of the Algarrobico hotel, down in - byword for corruption - Andalucia. More on the astonishing state-of-play here and here. On reflection, I may have done an injustice to pagans in this paragraph.

Finally . . . The Devil's Grain is now being besieged by the serious media. HT to Richard in Ferrol for this video of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight crossing swords with the Coca-Cola devil.

It's a rare blog in which the Devil features twice!