It is perhaps the perfect fund-raising stunt for the 21st Century: one that involves very little effort, allows individuals to put themselves in front of a camera, name-drop their cool friends, is highly sharable on social media and is in aid of a good cause. Plus, there is the added titillation of a wet T-shirt at the end of it.
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The ALS ice bucket challenge has snowballed in recent weeks with all the momentum of a super cute baby goat video on YouTube.
The concept is simple - a person has a bucket of ice and water tipped over their head, then nominates friends to do the same, while raising money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - or motor neurone disease via the ALS Association in the US, and similar charities in other countries. The rules around how this money is raised are a little blurry, with one version stating donations must be made if a nominated person welches on the challenge, while other versions have anyone who participates, and viewers themselves, encouraged to donate too.
Celebrities from Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and Cristiano Ronaldo and politicians including our own Education Minister Christopher Pyne have taken to it with gusto. Several national leaders - US President Barack Obama and UK PM David Cameron among them - have politely declined and instead opted to make a charitable donation. Tony Abbott also declined, possibly deciding there were more than enough revealing, dripping wet photos of the beach-loving PM in circulation already.
What started as a relatively small movement around the beggining of July for a little-known charity has quickly become a super-fad.
But it has prompted questions of whether this is a truly altruistic phenomenon doing good, or yet another form of 'slacktivism'.
Defenders point out it has raised an enormous amount of money (about $80 million and growing, according to Time magazine) for a serious and debilitating disease, which only attracted around $2.5 million of donations during the same period last year. The videos are generally pretty fun too.
But critics question whether this one-off burst of funding for a single charity, which hasn't said what it will do with the money, is a good use of medical research money. "Fundamental medical research should be coordinated sensibly, on a national level," argued Felix Salmon in Slate this week. "Meanwhile, there are thousands of charitable organisations out there that could really use the money going to ALS - could use it to make the world a better place today."
Other US critics have pointed out the jarring contrast between a Twitter feed equally split between wealthy American celebrities in swimming costumes gleefully tipping ice water on their heads for one cause, while their mostly black countrymen and women in Ferguson, Missouri, cop blasts of tear gas in the face for protesting the shooting of a unarmed teenage boy, with little vocal support from the celebrity realm.
The inanity of it all was perhaps best captured by a reporter in Gaza, who staged his own take on the challenge this week. Called the 'rubble bucket challenge' Ayman al-Aloul's version involved tipping a bucket of the dust and pulverised bricks from the war-ravaged area over his weary face to draw attention to the total destruction of that area and deaths of hundreds. Pointed, but somehow it hasn't quite caught on in the same way.
