The Drink Tank’s relentless schedule usually means that by the time I get ready to comment on “the most recent issue” there is an even more recent issue.

Issue #315 of The Drink Tank is the one I have in mind, where Chris Garcia and James Bacon, joined by Niall Harrison, Aidan Moher, Charlie Jane Anders, Jay Crasdan and Chris M Barkley, set about “Handicapping the Hugos”.

The premise of Hugo handicapping is to ruthlessly predict the winner – not rank one’s personal favorites, or arrange the nominees in ascending order of objective quality.

And Chris and James have certainly done that in the fan categories. Wiping the tears from their eyes, the duo predicts all the nominated blogs, bloggers and web artists will make a clean sweep of the fan Hugos. Yes, they can haz cheeseburger! Randall Munroe will overcome last year’s one-vote loss to be named Best Fan Artist. Pro writer Jim C. Hines will be annointed Best Fan Writer. SF Signal will win be voted Best Fanzine.

Is that true? Is the only remaining question whether concessionaires will be able to keep enough rope in stock at the Chicago Worldcon for all the fans who’ll want to hang themselves? Because these seem like pretty reasonable guesses to me. Can no one save us from this electronic doom?

But wait! I forgot one thing! Chris and James are kings of the internet too! They not only put out a PDF zine, last year’s Hugo winner whose titanic 300th issue will be featured in the Hugo Voter Packet. Their award acceptance video got over 40,000 views. They went viral! Who else on the ballot has done that? The only time I ever went viral was in high school with the Hong Kong Flu. They got four Hugo nominations this year! What’s with all this modesty? Why would the voters suddenly stop liking these guys? They didn’t predict themselves to win, the only thing that might have jinxed them — so look out world! I’m thinking that if Randall Munroe wins a Hugo this year, the main reason will be that Chris and James never took up drawing…