Looks like <body> backgrounds are making a comeback in a more tasteful form, as evidenced by the use of it on Evan Williams's (Blogger co-founder) blog and other sites such as Squidfingers (lots of other fantastic stuff there too). It appears Firda is crazy over them... k10k even has a random pixel pattern box thingy on their main page.

Looks like what they said about design trends moving in cycles is true after all.. Back in the days when Netscape first introduced background images, and html coders with dubious design sense abused it to death (man i still cannot forgive those sites that actually used animated GIFs for background tiles).

Background Tiles Back in Fashion?