Well, I used the basic suggestions above, and came up with this fun little waste of time (in a post below - I couldn't attach the file, even though it's only 12k)
A little background - this is based on the BOfH Excuse Calendar. If you don't know who / what that is, read over here first:
http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard.html
It's stored in shar format, created by GNU shar.
the "excuse" script assumes you have a working "/bin/ksh", and have common utilities like sed in your PATH.
excuse.web will output a weak excuse for HTML, and is meant to be called from serve_exc. serve_exc assumes that you have netcat (nc), and it's in your PATH,
and it was compiled with GAPING_SECURITY_HOLE defined (to allow it to use the "-l" option)... It'll listen on port 8080 for a connection from a web browser, run excuse.web, then start over...
It may take some fiddling, but take the code below, put it in a file called excuse.txt, and type "sh excuse.txt". Then "./excuse" and repeat for endless hours of fun!