Pavlov's Birds

This one gives new meaning to the term "bird call"... (I take it that MIT and Harvard don't share mutual pleasantries with each other very often.)

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 team, 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.