Bill Shunn was probably making a throwaway remark, a joke, when he mentioned nominating the @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed for a Hugo:

…[It] was probably better that Dan Sinker control the revelation than that someone else out him, which no doubt would have happened sooner or later. And at least now we know whom to nominate for that Hugo next year in the Best Related Work category.

But now that Rose Fox has blogged about Shunn’s idea on Genreville at Publishers Weekly it sounds practically inevitable:

Bill Shunn is spearheading a campaign to get @MayorEmanuel–yes, a Twitter account–nominated for next year’s Hugo in the “Best Related Work” category. This would of course be particularly well-suited to the 2012 Worldcon location of Chicago.

If you’re not familiar with the @MayorEmanuel account, a succinct summary is that it was the Twitter feed from an alternate-universe Rahm Emanuel. The feed was a non-stop stream of obscenity, Chicago in-jokes, politics, and pure far-out wackiness. His companions included a pet duck (named Quaxelrod after Emanuel staffer David Axelrod) and his adventures involved sleeping in igloos, crowd-surfing up to the stage to give his mayoral acceptance speech, and being taken to the secret celery farm on top of City Hall…

It seems every year the online fan community looks around for some way to carve its initials on the Hugo ballot. Will this be the next one? Rose may think it makes a better story associating the idea with next year’s Chicago Worldcon, still, how long will it take for someone to notice @MayorEmanuel started appearing in 2010 and ask, why wait?

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster and Andrew Porter for the story.]