For investors who bet the farm on online poker businesses, there is always the power of prayer. Kerusso.com offers a set of chips inscribed with such legends as “Call on the name of the Lord”.

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Obscenity arrest

The creator of a website that caused a furore of controversy by allegedly giving US soldiers free access to pornography in return for pictures of dead and mutilated bodies from Iraq and Afghanistan has been arrested on obscenity charges.

Chris Wilson ran the site from his flat in Polk Country, Florida. Last month he said that because the site is hosted in Amsterdam, he was not violating US laws. “Nice try,” Brad Copley, a prosecutor at the state attorney’s office, told the Ledger site. “He’s in charge of the website. He lives here. It doesn’t matter where his server is.”

www.theledger.com

Wizard wheeze

As government proposals on ID cards limped through the Commons, the vast majority of bloggers who wrote on the issue were opposed to the scheme. Once again the most amusing comment on the issue comes from the eclectech site, where Tony Blair made an appearance as Dorothy in “The Wonderful Swizz of the Cards”.

www.eclectech.co.uk

Who is Xenu?

December’s issue of Esquire will carry an article written by online volunteers. It started life as an error-strewn draft posted by an Esquire journalist on the wikipedia site, an online encylopaedia created by the public. The article, on the history of wikipedia, was revised by the site’s volunteer “editors”, who were given free rein to demonstrate the formidable scope of their knowledge.

The article begins: “What is the legal status of dwarf tossing? Did people really worship Jesus Christ’s foreskin as a relic? Where was crushing by elephant used as an execution method?

“And who is the mysterious galactic ruler Xenu at the heart of Scientology? You won't find the answers in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

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