I know this is standard headline grammar, but my god it was very hard to not read this as the mouse doing the filming every night. Specifically, filming a shed that belongs to a tidying man.
It's not standard headline grammar by definition. They do leave out function words (A mouse was), but in the same space, you could write: "Mouse tidying a man's shed every night secretly filmed." In which case "secretly" stands out as superfluous, because nobody expects you to inform the mouse beforehand.
> It is not the first time he has come across an organised rodent. When living in Bristol in 2019, his friend reached out for help fixing up a night camera when another mouse was keeping their shed in order.
I hate being one of those people who treats everything with suspicion, but he previously helped a friend who was also using a night vision camera to record a "tidying up" mouse?
I wouldn’t be overly suspicious. A wildlife enthusiast would be the in the right social circles if someone needed a night camera. Also, the mouse’s behaviour doesn’t seem to be too uncommon – just not well documented and/or recorded.
When my partner and I returned home after a 1 month trip, we discovered caches of 1cm food pellets (dog food?) in various places in our house: in one boot, in the pocket of one backpack, under our bedroom pillow, nestled between two couch cushions. The neatness made it seem mysterious: Did I forget I had stowed dog food in my backpack, and while packing let the backpack drip on our bed and couch? The boot is what gave it away as mousework.
Newspaper headline rules occasionally lead to syntatically ambiguous sentences [1], sometimes funny ones. In this case, the headline is a garden-path sentence [2]. Cutting out "to be" words (Mouse was filmed -> Mouse filmed) in headlines is called zero copula [3].
The parents used to have a very meticulous rat living in their compost bin. It would carefully anrrange all the bits of food inside, chucking out the things it didn’t like. On particularly cold nights it would stuff used teabags into the gaps around the lid to block up the draughts.
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[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadI hate being one of those people who treats everything with suspicion, but he previously helped a friend who was also using a night vision camera to record a "tidying up" mouse?
I wouldn’t be overly suspicious. A wildlife enthusiast would be the in the right social circles if someone needed a night camera. Also, the mouse’s behaviour doesn’t seem to be too uncommon – just not well documented and/or recorded.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity#In_headlin...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula#In_English
I'd say that was the culprit of many people blaming gremlins gnomes and the like.