Interesting data for demos

Question

For presentations/demo's of programming tools and languages, I find that the more interesting the data the better reception the presentation/demo gets.

The reverse is proven by how boring the Northwind/Adventure Works demo's Microsoft insists on using are.

The problem is where to get enough interesting data that is in the public domain from that is in a decent format?

I have been using Freebase's data dumps but the larger they are, the harder it is to actually get into a usable format like a relational database.

Does anyone have any good locations for interesting data?

Answer 1

what about the stackoverflow data dumps? might not be complex enough tho.