Six of the Best 404

Peter Black, quoting Toby Young, criticises Labour's record on education (and much else) in Wales: "Parental choice in Wales is limited to deciding whether to send a child to a school where lessons are taught in English or Welsh. The country has indulged in ... 'producerism's last hurrah'. Hardly surprising, then, that 26 per cent of the Welsh population over 16 have no recognised qualifications, according to the 2011 census."

Freedom from Command and Control has fun with councils' straplines.

"The old school headmasters were right; it is both desirable and possible to build character," says Stumbling and Mumbling.

Amy Jane Barnes on finds the Chinese community in Leicester is older than some sources suggest.

"It opened a month before Disneyland, but the years have not been so kind to this haven of kitsch. Now it lays abandoned, lonely and forgotten. Like all those Yuletide wishes you made under the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree." Roadtrippers visits two abandoned Santa villages in the United States.

Christopher Orr in The Atlantic resists those who would make Richard Curtis's film a beloved holiday classic: "But Love Actually is exceptional in that it is not merely, like so many other entries in the genre, unromantic. Rather, it is emphatically, almost shockingly, anti-romantic."