There’s a story about an MIT student who spent an entire summer going
to the Harvard football field every day wearing a black and white
striped shirt, walking up and down the field for ten or fifteen
minutes throwing birdseed all over the field, blowing a whistle and
then walking off the field. At the end of the summer, it came time
for the first Harvard home football game, the referee walked onto the
field and blew the whistle, and the game had to be delayed for a half
hour to wait for the birds to get off of the field. The guy wrote his
thesis on this, and graduated.