In 1907, the 5^th Earl of Carnarvon hired Egyptologist Howard Carter to aid him in his excavations in the Valley of the Kings. Carter worked for years, with a brief break caused by World War I, but it wasn’t until November 4, 1922, with Lord Carnarvon growing impatient and about to pull the plug on the whole operation, Carter got his big break.

That’s when he found stairs that led to a tomb he thought likely to be undisturbed. On November 26^th, with the excited Lord Carnarvon by his side, Carter chiseled a small hole leading to the antechamber of the young, and fairly insignificant King Tutankhamun. When asked if he saw anything, the Egyptologist answered, “Yes! Wonderful things!”

It took months to catalogue everything in the antechamber and it wasn’t until 1932 that Carter was finished removing the thousands of wonderful things buried with the pharaoh. Among those were musical instruments, chariots, weapons, and a mannequin.

Since then mannequins have gone through a number of changes. They’ve been life-size dolls shipped between European Aristocracy to exchange fashion trends, whicker dress-forms, and awkward 300-hundred pound sculptures with false teeth, glass eyes, and real hair.

At times they’ve been made from easily melted wax, have become the celebrated date on the arms of the occasional disturbed artist, and have come to life as the love interest in a bad eighties movie. Mannequins have been both curvy and slender, to reflect the fashion ideal of the era. They’ve been mangled by Salvador Dali, and they’ve often appeared in shop windows with no arms, no legs, and no heads. But longer than we’ve had big shop windows to put them in, and maybe even longer than we’ve had fashionable man-cardigans to display, mannequins have been around to creep us out.

Recently, a new kind of mannequin has taken over the Internet. Scores of people are now rising to the mannequin challenge. And by scores, of course, I mean high school students, athletes, and probably very soon, people old enough they probably ought to have better things to do.

The way it goes is that a group of people stand, completely still in mid-activity, as if they are mannequins, while another person with a camera moves among them filming close-ups of their stunningly (or not so) executed poses. And usually there’s music, because let’s face it, people standing still is not, on its own, necessarily an exciting thing to watch.

I say, why not rise to it? Because Internet challenges have been with us for years (not like actual mannequins, or man-cardigans, or King Tut, but still, a while) and this one might have come at just the right time. I think after the week the US (and to some extent the world) has had, and is having, we might all be feeling a little frozen anyway.

So go ahead, give it a try. I would, but I’m old enough I probably ought to have better things to do.