You've heard about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, right? It's an online charity fund-raising drive that's raked in more than $100 million globally to assist research and treatment for the much underfunded ALS (it's called motor-neurone disease in Australia). While brain diseases are the main focus, participants can donate to any charity they like.

For months now, people around the world have been tipping buckets of ice water over themselves in the name of charity. If you post a video online of yourself taking the said soaking, you're expected to donate $10 to ALS research. You then earn the right to nominate someone else to accept the challenge. If that person does it, in comes another $10. If they chicken out, they're told to kick in $100.

As someone who has written fund-raising material for many Australian charities (my wife actually does this for a living), I can assure you that the Ice Bucket Challenge is an astronomically successful campaign in a time when standing out from the crowd is getting more difficult for charities.

Who wouldn't applaud a success story like that? Plenty, including a 24-year-old Illawarra freelance artist (who I won't name because she's young and it wouldn't be fair) who took to the pages of this paper on Tuesday to pour her own brand of cold water on the challenge. Alongside the story she was pictured holding a poster that defiantly declared: "I refuse to waste such a valuable resource of [sic] water, when I'm more than happy to give my money to ALS."

While she's "all for the raising of funds for this horrible, terminal and degenerative disease", she does find "a lot wrong with the so-called ALS Ice Bucket Challenge".

You mean the one that's raised a so-called $100 million for a cause that used to get bugger-all?

Our idealistic youngster explains: "I wondered why would you not just donate the large sum of money if you were passionate about the cause?"

Let me spell that out for you: B e c a u s e p e o p l e o n l y h e a r d a b o u t t h e c a u s e v i a t h e c a m p a i g n.

Her other beef was that, apparently, "some people seem to lack knowledge on [sic] the actual challenge and just do it for some sort of social media acclamation".

Look, who gives a rat's what people's motives are for giving to charity? If they're giving - great. If their Facebook friends go "Awww" along the way, then everyone's a winner.

"And thirdly," she tut-tutted, "the gross awareness of simply wasting such a precious resource of clean water that Australia and other blessed countries take for granted." Then we got a lecture about the lack of clean drinking water in the Third World.

I doubt very many Australians take water for granted. We've been in drought since Adam was a boy. As for "wasting" buckets of the stuff, let's do the numbers; imagine 100,000 Australians (I'm sure I'm overestimating that) each tipped a 10-litre bucket of water over their heads — that's one million litres down the figurative gurgler. 

The good news is that water is recycled back into the atmosphere and will return in spades during the next thunderstorm. Or think of it this way: Warragamba Dam has a capacity of more than 2000 gigalitres. A gigalitre is one billion litres. So there's two thousand billion litres in just one Australian dam. In fairness, Warragamba is currently 88.6 per cent full but let's be real - the water "wasted" on the Ice Bucket Challenge is barely a drop in the proverbial.

I'm sometimes irked by things that "go viral", "Twitter meltdowns" and the like. But I try not to lecture others about which causes they commit to or whether Gangnam Style was awesome or crap.

We know we're lucky in the West and that the Third World is sad and desperate. But who knows, maybe people who felt good giving money to ALS might dig deep the next time an opportunity to donate to Third World assistance pops up on their iPad.

The real worry about the Ice Bucket Challenge is, like so many online phenomena, it may soon evaporate into cyberspace and those medical research dollars will dry up. Remember "Get Kony"? He still ain't been got. What about those Facebook petitions calling for immediate action against Boko Haram in Nigeria? Those 200 kidnapped schoolgirls still haven't been rescued by the US, the Interwebs or anyone else. If only some buckets of water could set them free.

■ The Illawarra lost one of its greatest on Tuesday when Wollongong City Council stalwart, Bellambi Point long-boarder and beloved Balgownie family man Jim Glancy lost his three-year stoush with cancer. Condolences to his amazing wife Belinda, their daughters Jordan and Bronte, Jim's mum Isa, his sisters Angela and Shirley, brother Billy and all his close blood and rusted-on friends far and wide. We'd all do a truckload more than tip a bucket of water over our heads to have you back, Jimmy. Rest in peace, ol' mate.