So, I've used this function before, but for some reason it's not working now.
$query = "SELECT * FROM localinterest ORDER BY rand() LIMIT 2";
All it does in this situation is pull the rows from the database in the order in which they're entered. The only thing I can think of that's different about this db is that I now have cells that are NULL and unpopulated. Could this be the cause? Are there other ways to randomize columns pulled without some complicated function?