Along those lines, I've been playing recently with using the google ngram data for markov chaining. The size of the corpus allows using 5grams without the problem of seeing text that has actually been written before (mostly.. it could just decide to spit out the complete works of shakespeare any second!), and the results were more interesting to me than most markov chains I've seen before. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/dadagoogoo/

Random example 1: nothing had pleased God to bestow upon you as to participation in physical activity and exercise . Don ' t rain .

Random example 2: sad and terrifying each time . After a quick nap .