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.
Let’s look at that T-shirt legend again, shall we?
“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.
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1 comment:
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.
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