Not curl, but I did something similar for a particularly dramatic death scene in a MUD 15 years or so ago. The hardest part was shutting up all of the normal MUD chatter that the players get (OOC chat and the like).

One thing that I often use is

  curl ifconfig.me

But this is so damn cool!

since you're only dependent on dumping stuff to the terminal, I think Telnet is comparable. Did you see the Blinkenlights Star Wars?

There are some pretty cool Telnet BBSes still running:

http://www.telnetbbsguide.com/brieflist.asp

It's a good way to be suddenly overpowered by nostalgia. I feel this strange desire to PEEK and POKE, and perhaps to call interrupt 13h.

Slashdot used to stick random Futurama quotes in their http header. I'm not seeing it anymore. curl -sI http://slashdot.org

I just added one to http://poyo.co .. thanks for the idea!