👉 Okay, letās tackle that wee bit of numerical obscenity ā "āEddie, you said 71 299?!ā - I know, right? Immediately feels like a cryptic voicemail from the apocalypse, doesn't it? Let's unpack this frankly rather aggressively-sounding mouthful.
What exactly is 71 299? Basically, this isnāt about phone numbers (though you could technically use that for a very, very paranoid caller ID scheme). Nope. It originated in the late 1980s and early 1990s amongst certainā¦ let's just call them "edgy youth cultures"āspecifically, the early rave scene in the UK, and then spread through skateboarding, BMX, and general youth subcultures of that era. Hereās where it gets weird, because nobody truly knows exactly what it meant originally. The prevailing (and somewhat depressing, honestlyābecause who actually thinks about this stuff? ) is a very loose, very dark reference to the 1971 seatbelt law in Great Britain. That blasted 1971 legislation mandated that the rear seats of passenger vehicles had to be fitted with seat belts. The number 299 (and then later 399 for the front seats) were the total number of seat belt fixing points required according to the regulations. Essentially, the earlier the seatbelt law
