First off, I'm alive and breathing. Yesss! Surgery went well. Now, on to the business at hand.

Thank you, www.buzzfeed.com, for nominating me to do the ice bucket challenge to raise awareness for #ALS. I would like to nominate www.mashable.com, www.gizmodo.com, and www.hellogiggles.com. You have 24 hours to complete the challenge or donate $100 to the ALS fund. Good luck!

When I found out that www.buzzfeed.com had nominated me to do the challenge, I was flattered and excited. Then, the questions arose. What is ALS? Where do I go to donate? How do you dump a bucket of ice water on a website? Thankfully, I found Buzzfeed's article "7 Ways to Dump a Bucket of Ice on Yourself (If You're a Website)" and I was okay. (I chose number 3.)

As we all know, ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease (why isn't it called LGD?), is that progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord, causing people to involuntarily dump buckets of ice water onto themselves. This weakens the immune system, and people die from hypothermia and pneumonia. It's so great that those of us who are able to experience what it feels like to have the condition can do so by dumping buckets of ice water on ourselves. It is literally eye-opening and teeth chattering.

ALS has been around since Lou Gehrig first got it in 1939. Since that time, it lay dormant in wait until about a week or two ago, when it flared up like a bad case of Sisyphus... err, I mean, syphilis... or Sisyphean syphilis, which is where you drag a different type of rocks up a hill. Anyway, everybody now has ALS fever, as evidenced by your clogged newsfeed on Facebook of all of your friends dumping buckets of ice water on themselves. If you haven't seen this at all, you must not have any friends. (Sorry) Everyone has done it. Everyone has been presented with the choice: donate 100 smackaroos or dump any volume of water you find suitable on yourself. You can do one or the other, but NOT both. Obviously, it is cheaper to give 100 bones to the charity, because if you do the math for the ice, you find that it's $0.30 for water, $0.15 for ice, and $1000 for a week of therapy.

I have a proposition. Why not donate any amount of money instead of dumping ice on your head? Look, if one million people each donate $1 or more, that's like...(calculator button noises)... $1,000,000 (or more!!). Let's do that, instead of wasting ice and water. Cause I've heard rumors that Al Gore is now going around speaking about global warming and the melting of polar ice caps on people's front yards.

Let's combat this particularly bad case of ALS this year by donating a little bit at a time to raise money so that a healthy and happy life can be had by all. Go here to donate and find information: http://www.alsa.org/

Finally, let's have a moment of silence for those ice cubes who have lost their lives in the fight against ALS. I spoke to one right before he died and posted the quote he gave me. Really inspirational and sad. #NeverForget

“Some diseases are worth melting for.”

— Olaf