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The Swifties are a formidable bunch – just ask Matty Healy – and a recent fan interview has proven the point yet again, it seems. The Taylor Swift fan skived off work on the night of the pop star’s gig in Cincinnati this weekend, hoping nobody would recognise her when she was meant to be home “sick”. Inspired by Swift’s song “Anti-Hero”, the fan kept her identity secret by dressing up as one of the music video’s ghosts. Standing in a queue of thousands ahead of the grand opening of the Taylor Swift merchandise truck, which was selling $75 hoodies and $40 tank tops, the brave Swiftie even got in front of a camera, giving an interview to local news channel WKRC-TV Local 12. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “There are two Swifties here who shall remain anonymous, who called in sick to work,” said the interviewer. “They travelled here from Louisville, so they’ve gotten quite a drive here. They’ve been here since about 2.45 in the morning.” Turning to the two people with blankets over their heads, and one wearing sunglasses over the top, the reporter asked: “Can you tell me what Taylor Swift means to you – she must mean a lot to you, because you’re here and you’ve called in sick.” One of the fans replied: “That is very true. I almost called my daughter’s middle name Taylor, so…” The fan said she wanted to buy a hoodie from the merch truck, and that she had tickets to see the pop star this weekend. She added that she was taking an 11-year-old little girl to the gig with her. “It’s her first time. I went to the show in Nashville, so it’s more for her.” Fortunately for the fans, the reporter was supportive of their disguise. “Your secret’s safe with me! I think it’s safe with everyone else here too.” The ghosts in “Anti-Hero” are a visual representation of the first verse of the song. “I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser,” she sings. “Midnights become my afternoons. When my depression works the graveyard shift, all of the people I’ve ghosted stand there in the room.” See their cameo in the music video here. The two real-life “Anti-Hero” ghosts quickly went viral after the exchange, with social media users finding the exchange hilarious. One person said: “Keep it weird, Louisville.” Another said: “I just know she gon f**k around and wear that same gray quarter zip to work one day and tell on herself.” Let’s just hope they never get found out. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Birkenstock has set a price for its initial public offering of stock that values the 249-year-old German maker of upmarket sandals at $8.64 billion

Since Instagram’s text-based alternative to Twitter, Threads, rolled out last week, a handful of memes and conspiracy theories have surfaced around the app’s unusual ‘at symbol’-like logo – from the inaccurate suggestion it was predicted by The Simpsons (it wasn’t), and now, to claims it’s actually linked to the devil (it isn’t). The baseless theory - seemingly backed by Twitter owner Elon Musk himself, if his public tweet likes are anything to go by – suggests the swirly icon secretly contains the number ‘666’, often referred to as “the number of the beast” and considered a link to the Antichrist. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Claiming they “can’t stop seeing it”, one Twitter user asked: “Does anyone else think the Threads logo just looks like 666? The first 6 is forward and white, then the second one is smaller and backwards, and the third one is the black space inside.” “How to put 666 ‘the number of the beast’ into a logo,” wrote another, in a tweet liked by Musk. Several other accounts have branded Threads “satanic” over the supposed link. In fact, the baseless claim became so popular that Instagram boss Adam Mosseri shared a thread on Friday explaining the real meaning behind the logo. “The Threads logo, in Instagram Sans, is inspired by the @ sign, which stands for someone’s username, the individual, and voice. “It’s a single unbroken line, inspired by the loop seen in the app when a thread is started,” he wrote. When one user commented that it “would have been entertaining” if Mosseri jokingly confirmed the conspiracy to be true, the exec replied: “It was tempting, but I feel like that kind of sass would just blow up in my face.” Sensible. Of course, this is just one fact which dispels this conspiracy theory as nonsense and baseless, but one lesser-known bit of historical trivia also exposes just how outlandish the claim is. All the way back in 2005, it was reported that a newly discovered fragment of the oldest version of the New Testament – the second part of the Bible – from the third century gave a different number entirely for the number of the beast. Found in historic dumps near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, the text from the Book of Revelation indicates it’s not 666 which is the fiendish number we should all be fearing, but the far less aesthetically pleasing 616. Professor David Parker, Professor of New Testament Textual Criticism and Paleography at the University of Birmingham, said: “This is an example of gematria, where numbers are based on the numerical values of letters in people’s names. “Early Christians would use numbers to hide the identity of people who they were attacking: 616 refers to the Emperor Caligula.” This is in contrast to the far more popular 666, which is understood to have referred to Emperor Nero. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.