Dave Barry on the '88 DNC in Atlanta:

But some friends and I went out there to the protest zone, which was then kind of a new idea, and we put boxes on our heads.

Mine was a telephone box; we had little slits cut into them. And we just stood there -- three guys wearing boxes on our heads. And within I would say five minutes, we had a media clot of several hundred people around us. We had print reporters, we had photographers. I mean, because as soon as one goes over they all start running over, and then the clot gets to its critical mass, where as far as these people are concerned it’s the Kennedy assassination, and they’re just running to get there because it might be news. And they’d ask us like “who are you,” and we’d say “we’re people with boxes on our heads,” you know? We were very honest -- we never said there was any protest or anything -- and then we were the lead protests in the AP roundup the next day, and we were in hundreds of papers. And we all wrote columns -- we all three of us were columnists -- about how stupid it was, and then I got these furious phone calls all the next day. I had to leave the bureau because of the just endless calls from editors, asking me why we’d hoaxed the media. And I said “well, we didn’t hoax the media, we had boxes on our heads and we said we had them. You’re the idiots who put it in the newspaper!”