Is there an easy way to grab the latest posts out of a Wordpress wp_posts table using a simple SQL query?

I have a Wordpress 2.9.2 installation as part of, but separate from, a larger system. It has a customized theme to look like the rest of the site but has otherwise nothing to do with it. I want to display the latest handful of headlines of posts made using Wordpress on a site of that other system. Preferably I do not want to mess around with importing any of the Wordpress library files.

Looking at the database structure I can't see an easy, straight-forward query to simply get the latest revision of the latest posts. The post_status can either be "post" or "inherit", the post_type "post" or "revision" and the parent "0" or the id of the original post of a revision. I can't figure out how to reliably filter different revisions of the same post, drafts, attachments and pages out of this mess and just get the latest revision of the latest posts.

I'm aware that the database schema is subject to change in subsequent versions of Wordpress, so shouldn't be relied upon, but that's a minor concern, since it's such a minor feature that could easily be fixed. If I understood how that database is supposed to work, that is.