Quick thought:
The rise of more interesting beers -in America- is related to the decline of smoking. I never could figure out all of the complaints against cheep beer until I tried to drink them without simultaneously smoking (which overwhelms all the taste/smell senses). A subsequent claim would be that the rise of cheap tasteless beer ( while a huge food engy accomplishment ) was aided by the rise of the popularity of smoking. A counterclaim might include actual facts.

http://www.ammurapi.com/files/hurfDurf.tar.bz2
Needed:
Probably some xnix distro with newish php and mysql installs
luck
it may need finagling
What it does:
Downloads data dumps from http://stuff.metafilter.com/infodump/
Includes schema for database to hold them
Fills it up
On re-run, only downloads updated dumps. Only inserts new information into DB .
Used for:
More playing.
Error handling? Naahh..
Good luck!
The initial importing takes a couple hours.. the db is possibly over-indexed. The data to be downloaded is a hundred MB or so. The DB created is around 750 MB.
I lurk and occasionally post on metafilter. One of the admins has a Markov thingy
A creation based on my ramblings:
Here's an interesting mess after person X passes his cowbell track on to this for so long i may as well let it go: Metafilter: It's getting bigger and it looks like a typical philosopher :-D.
seriously though, fun!
Back in January I found this cool meme:
http://ericpoulton.blogspot.com/2008/01/album-covers.html
It wasn't until today that I've tried it.
Just one for now.

"
1. The first article title on the Wikipedia Random Articles page is the name of your band.
2. The last four words of the very last quotation on the Random Quotations page is the title of your album.
3. The third picture in Flickr's Interesting Photos From The Last 7 Days is your album cover.
"
Here's the basketball stats page that I'm working on. The link goes to the IU/Western Michigan game.
I haven't been working on it too much lately because we are in conference play and the MAC doesn't publish play-by-play sub in/out information. Without that we only have the points graph.
During the day I do software projects. The rest of the time I try to do anything but software..