Maybe we need a different bucket challenge to support those with no access to clean water. We could all pee in buckets.
Dumping ice water on your head looks kind of fun.
From the Guardian's coverage, i.e. from the specific photos they have chosen to illustrate it, it seems to be a socially-acceptable form of wet t-shirt contest. Crack on, ladies.
I really want to go to a water slide park soon, I went by one recently and it looks like water slide technology has really advanced in the 25 years since I was last on a waterslide. Super steep slides, these ones that look like a giant toilet bowl and you circle down the side -- awesome.
Also some fussbudgets and schoolmarms are trying to shut down this giant urban waterside they have planned for downtown because they are sanctimonious tools about the drought.
At any rate, we're off to a water park for the day
So great.
Have fun!
There was a snarky captioned photo making the rounds (well, among people I know who work on water-access issues) with some kid and the text "Wait, you have so much clean water that you shit in it?".
A waterpark in wildwood nj has a flowrider you can use with no extra charge. So much fun.
I think we already identified the ultimate water park in an earlier thread.
HOTTEST COOLEST TIME IN TEXAS.
Argh! Thanks a lot, Heebie.
you have so much clean water
No, but we like to pretend.
We were at a water park a couple of weeks ago with a very steep, very high water slide. My wife's eight-year-old nephew went down, so then she had to, despite misgivings. And then, of course, I had to, despite abject fear. It was m-fun.
I saw Rob Ford do the ice bucket challenge and then challenge every other Canadian politician to follow suit. On the basis of nothing else, I formed an opinion that it was a bad idea.
In light of 11, the slide we went down wasn't very high at all. But going in a raft is cheating.
My feed contains lots (well, more than ten) of people dumping ice water on their heads, but many (including me) are friendquaintances with a woman whose mother died last year after a short struggle with ALS, so she is getting tagged frequently. There's a split, though, between friends who know her and those who don't, who are posting about the decline in research funding and how this trend isn't helping the big picture. Then, there's a friend who's running a marathon to raise money for water.org. I'm waiting for him to weigh in.
Also, I think just about everyone is donating as well as making videos, which misses the point of the "challenge" but whatever.
Oh, and the top ice water video in my feed is GWB because someone I know liked it. Maybe heebie's feed will spit that out because Texas.
I had never heard of this ice bucket thing until this past weekend, when someone mentioned its ubiquity and made me feel even more out of touch than usual. And now apparently a bunch of bros colleagues in the office are planning to do it this afternoon. I'm still unclear on how dumping a bucket of ice water on your head translates into money for ALS research.
Yeah, I wondered what the particular ALS connection was. I also wondered, uncharitably I suppose, whether ALS is a particularly effective use of charity money or research money. It's terrible, but so are lots of things.
1: This is a much better idea, but you'd have to switch up the rules a bit so that it's only if you donate $100 that you get to pee on Zuckerberg or Gates.
If only Obama could say something about the ice bucket challenge! But! That would cause a right-wing backlash! Oh, what are we to do?
One of my best friends is dying of ALS. We were planning on meeting in Portland in a few weeks with a couple other guys and he's had to back out because he's not really capable of traveling any more. Things seem to be spiraling quickly. Here's a video of him of him discussing the disease and its impact (shot in November, so the disease hadn't progressed as much). I've never been able to bring myself to watch it, but everyone who has seen it says it's quite powerful and educational.
As fa as the Ice Bucket challenge, I gather it's tripled or quadrupled the amount of money the ALS Foundation normally gets in the same time frame, so whether or not it's a stupid way of promoting research it seems to be working.
18: $100? That would get you Melvin Zuckerberg of East Orange, NJ.
Wow. After writing 8 I revisited the wikipedia page and found it was recently updated:
"On April 2, 2014, the original management, who has since repurchased the property, announced that Mountain Creek Waterpark would be renamed back to Action Park beginning with the Summer 2014 season, based on an increasing rise in nostalgia, as current adults recount their experiences at the park in the 1980s and 90s."
I think we have a location for the next Unfoggedacon.
So sorry about the bad news, Chopper.
22: If so, expect to find me as I would have been in my youth: Nursing a basket of fries in the lodge, with way too many condiments.
I keep seeing links to "the 25 hottest guys doing the Ice Bucket Challenge" which is stupid and maybe offensive but not so stupid or offensive I don't watch.
A fb friendquaintance who had a friend die of ALS got very pissed about the whole thing and indirectly referenced the whole Maimonides ladder of charity thing. But it's making tons of money, right?
OP-wise I have weirdly fond memories of a day during my period of horrible anxiety when we went to Schlitterbahn and I spent most of it on the lazy river thing and then finally took a Xanax and went on a big slide.
17: The connection is convoluted, but the charity seems solid and does fund research. The added money collected so far comprises more than 25% of what NIH spends annually on ALS research. Funding peaked at $59M in 2010. I'd say their best hope is that it ends up like Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's work, which has changed the field and has funded things that are going into human trials after more rapid than normal development stages.
The disagreement I see is that this is energy being harnessed for a good thing while an even bigger topic (a 32% drop in NIH's budget since 2010) is passing unremarked. Curmudgeonly, to be sure, but it's of huge importance to many of my friends given that lots do biomedical research. NIH's budget is about $30B.
20: I'm so very sorry about your friend. I wish there were something modern medicine could do.
Jesus, I'm sorry to hear that, Chopper.
I hate this ice bucket thing. I didn't see it at all before this weekend, but now it's completely taken over my feed. And now that I've seen GWB do it, I hate it even more. Want to be like GWB? Dump a bucket of ice water on your head. Otherwise just write a check if you support the cause like a normal human being. I'm glad it's raising money but 26.2 gets it right.
Is this the general facebook idiocy thread? In my feed, there an OUTRAGED post by someone complaining about an article in the "Germantown Times" poking fun at their neighborhood. They are OUTRAGED because the article says inaccurate and disparaging things about their neighborhood. They have hired a local law firm to send a cease and desist letter to the "reporter" who authored the article. (A copy of the letter is posted.) There follow LOTS of OUTRAGED comments about journalistic ethics, OUTRAGE, etc. Finally, I see a comment that appears sane: "For what it's worth, the Germantown Times is a parody side, kind of like The Onion. It's not a real neighborhood news site, and [the reporter who supposedly authored the article] is not a real person." This is all true, of course, as was immediately apparent to anyone with half a brain who read the article. But apparently, "what it's worth" is not very much, because this barely slows the outrage. Representative follow-up comment: "It doesn't matter if it's "real" or not. It was still printed and implied that it was true."
I saw that Wonkette was getting labeled with the Facebook satire tag, even though its not actually satire.
32: that NIH number, plus this NYT article on volunteer firefighters, made me annoyed at fundraising generally.
In surveys, firefighters consistently cite the endless burden of fund-raising, which takes up to 60 percent of their work time, as one of the biggest deterrents to staying on the job.
We take the tiny number of people with the wherewithal to crawl through burning houses saving kittens, and we make them organize charity auctions? God forbid we should have some sort of medical-research/charity/firefighting funding priorities, instead of a perpetual charity-vs-charity shouting match funded by your charity.
29.1
I really can't see why publicizing a disease to get more contributions ($8.6 million on Tuesday alone) to research and cure it is a bad thing.
Is all the angst just pearl-clutching because the publicity is so non-UMC, non-serious? Is it because we don't trust bros and Republicans to actually do what any normal person would do even if they took the ice bucket, which is actually contribute?
The other charity that annoys me is charity-funded hospital construction. "Our Zaha Hadid atrium was funded by the James Q. and Estelle P. Whiffenpoof foundation ... allowing us to poach high-revenue patients from the hospital across town and increase shareholder value."
the publicity is so non-UMC
It is?
Oh my, now I see a ALS stem cell research kills babies post in my feed because the friendquaintance who lost her mother (and is extremely religious) commented on it saying there are other ALS charities that follow wingnut for "ethical" research. There are comments suggesting embryo adoption that seem to be sincere. My carefully limited feed does not usually have this sort of thing. Yuck.
Something about bake sales and schools and the army should fit on a bumper sticker.
Wouldn't it be great if schools had bake sales on air force bases so that bomber crews could have time to prepare for mass destruction while still having a nice dessert.
Wouldn't it be great if schools held bake sales for the army under a negotiated procurement contract so they could charge $300 for a brownie... resulting in lower property taxes.
35: "non-UMC"
I didn't see any brie and white wine, or for that matter kale and quinoa salad.
38: I've mentioned before that this country actually did have bake sales to raise money for the air force, and it wasn't a sign of changed priorities but rather of desperation and a strong desire not to be enslaved.
while Humble AfricaCalifornia would like us to please remember that they have hardly any water at all.
FTFY.
44: That wasn't completely disjoint from the penwipers/church roof/village fête era of fundraising, was it? The flip side of making firefighters spend time fundraising was declaring a class of people unemployable and boring them into fundraising work. (Though _How Women Saved the City_ suggests there have been worse strategies, overall.)
Actually, about firefighting, shouldn't a firefighters' life have a lot of slack in it? Because we need to over-staff for the average day to be ready for disasters?
Utterly peripheral thought about the Battle of Britain, and the stained-glass window commemorating it in .... someplace tourists go in London, sorry... : All the men in the window were beautiful, and is it more or less cruel to memory to represent the dead that way if they weren't really? Are they beautiful now because we remember them with love and honor, or are we forgetting something important about people who weren't?
Movies likewise, but a national religious monument seems more important.
From Len Deighton's Bomber:
Handsome lads they all were. Relaxed and smiling like any one of a million young men. Looking at those prints now, it would be easy to say that it was the work of an amateur or that the materials were inferior or unsuitable because they were stolen from Air Ministry supplies. That wouldn't be true. The fact is that the boys were all like that: their faces were not out of focus or over-exposed, they were bland and smooth and as yet unformed. Those grinning cherubs awkwardly placed in that wartime snapshot are a high-definition portrait of the men who that night climbed into their flying boots...
Where have all the flowers gone?