I decided that it's time to get rich and famous, so I'm building a tool that generates Hollywood movie titles. I plan to sell them for money.
Example movie name: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Basically, I would take a name of a famous historical figure and combine it with a respectable profession to get the name of a movie.
There is a problem, though. I don't know all the names of historical figures, and I sure would mind writing them all down by myself. So, is there an online database or service I could query, that would return the name of a random historical figure? How would I do it in Javascript (node.js)? The professions I can come up with myself.
Edit: I'm looking for something that has an API.
You might want to check out DBPedia. It offers a SPARQL endpoint interface to Wikipedia's data, and returns machine-readable results formatted as RDF.
Don't be put off by RDF and semantic-webby stuff... for simple queries, you can parse the RDF as XML and handle it that way.
Why don't you try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_celebrities
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biographies_of_famous_Americans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_figures
This one also looks pretty good:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/
Not sure if they have an API though! ;)