I did that all the time in Drupal 6 using Views. It's dead simple. (Order random limit 1, done.) I haven't tried doing it in Drupal 7, but I'm sure the same method still works.

--Larry Garfield

Larry, that was my first option but kept getting errors returned in the views UI and logged an issue. Getting it to work using DBTNG was pretty straight forward and yes, I used the orderRandom() I wanted to use this as an exercise to get to know the EntityController class better. Is it the random requirement that is making that difficult - what if we remove the requirement and just want to return all the records so that I loop thru them (I just need the body field)