you don't need the `\!*'.

here's one cute/dumb hack I'm proud of (slightly sanitized by using foo instead of what I normal call it):

alias foo 'set FOO="oneof `cat ~/foo.txt`"; set FOO=`$FOO`; curl -s $FOO | xv -root -quit -rmode 4 -'

foo.txt is a list of urls separated by newlines. oneof is a dumb perl hack that returns one of its arguments to stdout. so, it sets the variable FOO to be a call to oneof, then executes it saving the result to FOO, then curls it to xv to display it as a background.

two bits of hackish cuteness: (1) the result of the execution of FOO is saved back to FOO, and (2) FOO ends up, afterward, with the url of the randomly chosen file.