Originally published at: The inventor of Tickle Me Elmo was a Unabomber suspect | Boing Boing
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I thought tickle me Elmo was a rude Australian phrase.
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So I guess it would have been “and the lesser charge of being the unibomber” in the overall plea deal, right?
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Reminds me of a scene from The Wire when the Baltimore PD is assigned an FBI profiler who is described in glowing terms as the agent who led the Unabomber investigation.
McNulty then takes an unsubtle dig at the guy by recalling that said investigation dragged on for 17 years and only ended after Kaczynski‘s brother ratted him out.
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It is uncanny, but also not uncommon. For every crime where there is a single perpetrator, there are always a host more suspects. It’s always hard to grapple with when it turns out you are one of the suspects, but generally speaking, our mental disconnection from the event is usually enough to quell any suspicion. Not always though and that’s where it can sometimes get extremely unsettling. It’s the kind of thing we see over and over on television, but when you live it first person, it can be life altering. It actually has happened to me, but I got through it just fine. Nowadays, you could very possibly be more quickly eliminated by the steady stream of data and tracking from your cell phone. That in itself is also uncanny.
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Alternatively you might end up with an LEO fixating on you and deciding to plant evidence because he ‘knows’ you did it. Maybe you’d be exonerated decades later, maybe not. I suspect it happens far too often. The idea of being imprisoned or worse for something that I didn’t do is one of those terrifying notions that actually happens sometimes.
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Was Kaczyński ever investigated as a Tickle Me Elmo suspect?
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This sounds like a bad remake of The Life of Brian.
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Reminds me of the toxicity displayed in this scene in LA Confidential
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In the end, aren’t we all, all of us, Unabomber suspects?
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This is hilarious to me on a personal level. One of my cousins was a toy designer and his company was responsible for a later version of Tickle Me Elmo (I think it was Tickle Me Elmo Extreme). The thought of him being a Unabomber suspect is just too funny 
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The original toy’s name was bad enough because Elmo never uses the pronoun “me,” instead referring to himself in the third person. What sorry excuse for a marketing executive decided to append that with the even-more-off-brand adjective “EXTREME”?
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It was the late 90s, everything was extreme.
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So it’s been a few years - I wonder if people who grew up with those elmos have fond memories of them.
Elmo hasn’t forgotten them.
Elmo remembers eevvverythiiing…
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I worked alongside a woman at an outdoor education school in the foothills of Central CA in 1983. Her daughter had been a bank teller who was held up in 1979 or 1980. She was handed a note by a bank robber and she did what the note told her to do, which was to hand over her money. For some strange reason, the FBI fixated on her daughter and thought she was somehow involved or knew the suspect.
It was pure hell for her daughter.
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That would be a resounding “no” from my Kiddo, now a tween. MIL bought two, one for her house, one for ours, because her best frenemy’s grandson “just loves it so much”, so of course her grandchild would (i.e. should) too. Kiddo hated it on sight. That was one thing she and the dog agreed on.
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