Dazed and confused? Not me. I’m just Lost in the Cheese Aisle.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

SNATCH

Every once in a while, the Missus and I will encounter something that gets our attention... as in, causing us to whip our heads around in a neck-snapping double-take.

We had one of those moments at IKEA last week.  She Who Must Be Obeyed spotted them first, a couple with an eye-catching logo.  After a while, when we caught up to them as we wandered the giant rat-maze that is IKEA, I asked if I might take a photograph.  Here they are, faces blurred to obscure their identities... because I did not tell them that I planned to slap their likenesses all across the Intertubes.

Snatchy Couple

Let’s look at that T-shirt legend again, shall we?

Snatch
“99 Problems, But a Snatch Ain’t One.”  Indeed.

I have no idea what those other 99 problems could possibly be, but my attention was focused on the one thing our couple’s problem wasn’t, i.e., a snatch.  (Presumably, that was the intention of whoever designed the T-shirt.)

“Snatch” being a word that has an honored place among the 460-odd synonyms for “vagina,” one could speculate on whether this couple was, in fact, boasting about their sex life.  Quality?  Frequency?  Who can say?  But a look at the young man’s physique, along with a nodding acquaintance with weightlifting terminology, suggests that the T-shirt is, rather, a mildly boastful statement of iron-pumping skills.

The snatch is an activity in which a weight is raised in one quick, uninterrupted motion from the floor to a position over the lifter’s head. Sounds easy, but when you’re dealing with world-class competition, those weights get pretty massive: The current world’s record for a snatch is 214 kg (472 pounds!), held by one Behdad Salimi of Iran.

Presumably, a snatch is not one of Mr. Salimi’s 99 problems either.  A hernia, however, might be one.

Update: Kevin Kim takes time off from running around the steamy streets of Seoul to inform us that the line is a comic paraphrase of Ice-T’s 1993 rap choon “99 Problems.” Eleven years later, Jay-Z took the song and recast it, retaining the title and chorus. So it’s been around a while... two decades, to be exact.

“Got 99 problems and a bitch ain’t one...” Longevity, apparently, ain’t one either.

1 comment:

Kevin Kim said...

For what it's worth: the tee shirt quote is a riff off the 1993 song by rapper Ice T: "99 Problems," in which he raps, at one point, "99 problems and a bitch ain't one" (here). In 2004, rapper Jay-Z took up the refrain. So this quote has a rather old pedigree. Twenty years old, in fact.