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Pastimes : Laughter is the Best Medicine - Tell us a joke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (21556)	12/9/2001 7:52:36 PM
From: MrsNose	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 62549

apparently it's an urban legend: found this on snopes.com, but still hilarious. Legend: A student dresses as a referee and spreads birdseed on the school football field every day during the summer. At the school's first home game that fall, the field becomes inundated with birds as soon as the referees step onto the field. Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1995] 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. Origins: As noted in the example above, this legend is generally claimed to have taken place at a specific university (primarily MIT, who students are known for their ingenious pranks) and to have been the subject of the perpetrator's thesis. The legend -- at least in the form commonly told -- is undoubtedly apocryphal. The author of a 1990 book about pranks pulled by MIT students stated that he had not come across this tale during his years of research. Last updated: 20 April 1997