Record numbers of people in Britain have applied to leave the country forever to seek a meaningful existence on Mars.

Over 60 million Britons have applied to become Mars colonists with non-profit organisation Get Me the Shit Out of Here since submissions for a place aboard the first manned flight to the Red Planet opened on the 1st of May. Get Me the Shit Out of Here hopes to start transporting Britons to Mars by 2023, with more astronauts arriving thereafter.

“We knew we’d see a large number of British applications, but this is ridiculous,” Get Me the Shit Out of Here’s Chief Executive Officer David Parker said in a statement. “While we’re thrilled to see so many applications, transporting the entire population of Great Britain sort of defies the point.”

According to Parker, the company is eschewing scientific credentials in favour of “quirky, zany and easy-going people. What we’re looking for is not restricted to people with an academic background.”

Anyone can apply by submitting a 3-minute video stating his or her motivations for wanting to leave the UK and never return; with “It’s full”, “It’s dull”, “I fancy a change of scenery” and “It’s just crap” cited as the most popular reasons for leaving.

Get Me the Shit Out of Here received applications from all over the UK, officials said. Applications from High Wycombe lead the way, with Middlesbrough, Swindon, Derby and Luton making up the top 5. Shortly after applications opened, the Get Me the Shit Out of Here site crashed under the weight of submissions.

Adam Merry, a 38-year-old Mars hopeful from Maidenhead said: “I’ve been a bit depressed recently. After a divorce and the day I’ve just had, I think it’s time for a change. My video tagline states that I put the ‘nought’ in astronaut’. I’ve not had many votes.

“I’m not really a people person, so I think eight months in space and being one of the first to colonise Mars would do me good. I can probably deal with the toxic dust, arctic temperatures and inability to return to Earth. Internet access and the calibre of the women on Mars might be the clincher, though.”

John Bishop seriously needs to fuck off.

Here are the original LDRs in all their terrifyingly vacant glory. But something’s missing…

There we go. Sporting a fine pair of the emperor’s new lips.

(Images courtesy of @fromdesktildawn)

It’s obvious that Chris Brown is a humungous berk.

Surely if we’re posting disclaimers on Brown’s album, it’s only fair that we decorate the albums of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Dr. Dre, Flava Flav, Ronnie Wood, Eminem, James Brown, Axl Rose, Tommy Lee, Fleetwood Mac, Miles Davis and er, Bez with similar assertions. You don’t see stickers adorning Ike Turner albums, and Ike Turner makes Chris Brown look like Elmo.

So, if Chris Brown’s getting the disclaimer treatment, here a few more artists that should probably come with a warning:

and finally…

Have I missed any? Who else needs a disclaimer?

(Thanks to the remarkable Rob Richardson for the images. Check his stuff out here)

I abhor marriage proposals. If I’m ever drunk enough to pop the question, I’d do so knowing that unless I orchestrate a proposal on par with the Cirque du Soleil, the gesture’s likely to be eclipsed by a glut of attention seekers determined to mark their intimate moment with a zany viral video attempt.

Down on one knee and ‘Will you marry me?’ simply doesn’t cut it anymore. That question directed at the YouTube-savvy female is likely to illicit a hopeful glance round, followed by ‘so…where the hell is the Leonard Bernstein number, Scott? You humdrum wastrel. The answer’s no.’

On one hand I’ve got to give it to the guys. What pebbly-hearted harpy could refuse, faced with a congregation of sweaty friends and family exhausted having spent months learning the routine from Thriller, or Step Up 5: Dance Dance Darfur? Any man that goes through the rigmarole of pulling off that kind of feat deserves a pity yes at least, lest a snub be met with a family-based gang beating to the tune of ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’. On the other hand I question the sexual orientation of a man that not only puts that much thought into a proposal, but opts for a Bruno Mars track to accompany it.

Poor Amy. She never stood a chance. Live reaction shot? There’s no way anyone could make it through a private dance number with an ambivalent look on his or her face. It’s Happy Birthday syndrome: no matter how disastrously out of tune and dreary it is, you have to grin and bear it. Isaac Lamb knew what he was doing: Amy was going viral. And what happens now? Isaac’s set an impossibly high benchmark unless the wedding involves the pair being blasted round the Large Hadron Collider into eternity.

Online marriage proposals are over share fetishism. How long before we start seeing viral divorce videos with titles such as ‘Craig, I simply don’t love you anymore’ or ‘You’re skint. I’m off’ or ‘I’m fucking your best friend. Surprise!’? I can give that a thumbs up.

The wind in your hair, the solitude of the trail, the feel of warm Vaseline slowly evaporating around your genitals. Yeah: running is awful. 85% of the time spent running is done wishing your shins would stop aching, your nipples would stop bleeding and shiftless children would stop heckling your diminutive spandex knob.

For city dwellers, maintaining a runner’s lifestyle is an arduous undertaking. For many of us the luxury of rolling hills are a fantasy. Instead we’re to make do with whatever shit-smeared, graffitied patch of gangland greenery we can find. This has a tendency to throw some rather horrific hurdles in our already strenuous path.

Here are the top five perils of the urban runner:

Children

I’m sure the collective noun for a group of children is a bastard. Nothing strikes fear into the heart of the urban runner like spotting a bastard of children. As you correct a bitter posture, mop your brow and attempt to emulate an Ironman in training you’re suddenly aware of your incredibly erect nipples. The bastard can smell fear as you approach. ‘Nice tits!’ one of them shouts. ‘You look gay!’ says another. ‘YOUR MUM!’ comes your caustic riposte. Your heavy panting/crying does little to drown out their jeering as you resume the gait of a great clunking nerd.

The omnipresence of junk food

Inevitably your city route will take you past junk food and drink. More often than not, only drunks shovel that dross into their maw. However, there’s something about the smell of junk food that’s strangely seductive when you’re running. Everything bad smells good: beer, exhaust fumes, tramps, even Chinese food. To make matters worse, the people gorging themselves see the lust in your eyes, staring out from their luminescent glut-houses. Them necking carbs; you, healthy, yet far closer to death and dribbling, face pressed up against the window like a pig snorting for truffles.

Animals

I’m a dog person, provided the owner doesn’t see runners as one big sweaty tennis ball for their beloved Killer. Dogs, however, are pussycats. The real shits are geese. Canadian ones. Vicious, territorial, hissing gits of the towpath. Canadian geese casually flap around all nonchalant and dumb, then, as soon as they see you coming it’s as if you’ve tried to chat up their bird in a nightclub. If you’re to tackle geese, you need to be big. If they prepare to attack, throw your hands in the air. People will think you’re loco, but they’ll have nothing but respect once they see how flawlessly you’ve dismissed those winged hell beasts.

Clothes

With every Matt, Dan and Alex running around in tracky-b’s, a wife beater and a classic Adidas hoodie from JD Sports, you’d be mistaken for assuming that you’ll look like anything other than a complete dick strutting around in the latest threads from Nike. The T-shirt you’d normally reserve for the painting and decorating won’t cut it with the city runners. You need to spend a fortune on the latest material from NASA in order to put the running Nazis off the scent of fresh meat. Sadly, no running clothes look good. Gone are the days when you’d look like the slightly rotund member of Run-DMC.

Runners

If a group of children is a bastard, a group of runners is a twat. Spying a twat of runners elicits much the same response as spotting a bastard of children, except scorn replaces fear. They effortlessly patrol the towpath like a pack of Lycra-clad vigilantes, yelling things such as ‘on your right, feeble pedestrian!’ as they barge you into the canal. One of them appears to be smoking, another either has the post-run bananas, or he’s just really happy to be running. Effortlessly fit, they represent everything you’re not. They’ll post their personal best on Facebook.

What’s putting you off going for a run, you fat slob?

Instagram is great. For those who don’t already know (and Blackberry owners), Instagram is a photo sharing application that lets users take pictures, add filters and share with their friends. Instagram is to pictures what The Edge’s effects pedals are to his guitar playing.

Now it’s finally launched on Android, it’s only a matter of time before Instagram becomes horrendously passé. In the future our kids will ask, ‘but you were the generation that pioneered digital photography! How come granddad’s pictures are better than this grainy toss?’ So make the most of it while you can.

The good news is that it doesn’t take much to become a pro Instagramer – or iPhoneographer as some have dared christen themselves. Here’s how it’s done:

Throw plenty of shit at the wall

Instagram’s all about quantity over quality. It’s like Twitter in that you’re far more likely to get a response provided you saturate your feed with an assortment of the non-events you pursue in your free time. It might be some decorating you’ve done; a muddy bike after a long ride; or the dead prostitute you’ve woken up next to in a cold, blood-smeared room at a Travelodge. The options are endless. Eventually the insipid photography you’ve chosen to represent your dreary life will be ratified via a few likes. You’ve made it! Why not put on an exhibition?

Keep it stock

There are some basics you’ve got to master before anyone will take you seriously in the ruthless world of Instagramography. You can take a picture of any old crap and it’s passable once you’ve layered a filter over the top. Exposed brickwork is always popular. Urban decay is so hot right now. Whatever you had for dinner is a great one. Cats in boxes. The sky! As humans it’s easy to overlook the great firmament that looms over us 24/7, so make sure you take a picture of it doing something slightly different than the thing it did 15 minutes ago. Remember the mantra: Red sky at night, Instagramer’s delight. Red sky at morning? Yeah, fuck it. Take a picture of that as well.

Filter into oblivion

That picture of a nondescript, poorly lit alleyway that tramps defecate down won’t impress anyone. But add a little X-pro II magic to the mix, with a twist of tilt-shift and BAM! You’re now your own self-facilitating Tumblr blog! Have you thought about doing band photography? ‘Cos you’re like, a pro or something! You were always quite artistic, but your parents made you do business studies because art is for wastrels. Watch the likes roll in. You’ve finally been recognised for your vision. Don’t touch me, bro. I’m framing my next Instagram shot.

Add a pretentious title

Once you’ve layered your picture with more filters than the Brita factory, it’s time to label them with painfully overambitious titles. This is your chance to unleash your inner artist. Don’t just call it ‘A Window’. Call it something like ‘A crestfallen portal that looks into the deepest chasm of my empty, empty soul’ or ‘Life is a decaying plastic Ikea chair that’s been discarded in a skip and crapped on by pigeons’. Failing that, title it after any of the books by the philosophers you learnt, and subsequently forgot about at uni. Go deep!

Are you using Instagram? Does the Android launch signal the end? What Instagram staples piss you off? Do tell.

The thrill of seeing my favourite band was once enough to eclipse the terror that accompanies spending time penned by a mass of sweaty, idiotic and tactile public. For the well-seasoned gig-goer, nothing rouses disdain like the realisation that in order to fulfil a rapidly fleeting interest in music, we’re to endure wretched people for extended periods of time. I’m talking about gigs.

Problems with attending gigs stem from the fact that you’re observing something highly personal in a public space. Regrettably, people that may or may not give a toot about the artist you’ve paid hefty pound to watch are invading the 20 centimetres of personal space you hold oh so dear, and most of the time they’re intolerable morons. There are several abhorrent behavioural traits that your common gig-going goon will observe, but for the sake of brevity I’ll limit myself to my five biggest gig grievances:

Claiming a place

You have to get to a gig early if you’re to secure a good spot. Fine, drink beer, but beware: once you’ve left your space for a piss/top-up, it’s fair game. Drunkenly elbowing a path back through the crowd and expecting your place to be there when you return is a definite no-no. Should you require a solid real-estate investment, why not consider booking a seat on the balcony? Although, no matter how much you try and justify sitting on your arse up in the nosebleeds, remember that you’ll garner nothing but disdain and expressionless stares from the floor dwellers who look like dumbstruck UFO witnesses among a mist of fart smells.

Filming/Taking pictures

Hi, budding Donn Pennebaker: No one wants to see your ill shot, shit-sounding home movies from three miles back. You’re not in the press pit and your slipshod Youtube video won’t make you Internet famous. If you insist on taking grainy shots of the poorly lit fop on stage, do as the professionals do: take pictures for three songs, then put the camera away and enjoy the gig IN REAL LIFE! Equally as intrusive are those who, once filming’s begun, insist on holding their camera aloft, only to gaze into the diminutive LCD screen that now draws the gaze of everyone behind like moths to the flame.

Talking

Where’s the pickaxe? If there’s one thing that detracts enjoyment from a gig the most, it’s the number of blathering shits that find it impossible to cement their frothing rents shut. I’m always disappointed that an artist will simply play over the inane murmur of yammering dolts, knowing they’d have the support of the audience were they to unplug their guitar and dash it round the hollow skull of the discourteous shit who feels that his/her feckless conversation is more important than my £15…and the music, or something. There’s nothing wrong with the odd sentence here or there, but to be ignorant of a performer so much so as to engage in a full conversation is downright rude.

Bands

Bands! What the hell are you doing? You’re dull. This could be symptomatic of my once rich and varied gig attendance, but have you noticed that bands don’t put in the effort any more? There are, of course, exceptions; however, I’m getting a little tired of the endlessly dreary stream of tepid, guitar weary piss that dribbles onto stages of late. You know you’re onto a loser when the band takes to the stage with about as much gusto as a fart in a care home. I’m sure getting blown by groupies night after night, living on the road with no responsibilities and fulfilling your life-long dreams must be a real kick in the balls, but could you please try and make it worth me missing that breast examination special on The One Show to be here? Thanks.

Molestation

Not just one for the girls. Having survived many a near buggering at an all boys’ school, imagine my horror upon learning that my sweet arse is fair game in the real world. You’ve managed to secure a great spot at the front. At first the pressing weight of the crowd provides a welcome support, but as the main act settle into their set and everyone begins to sweat, you wonder if that warm, throbbing protuberance you assumed is the soft hand of a fair maiden is in fact the bulging jeans-cock of a hairy sex offender. There’s nothing you can do. Your arms are pinned. You’re Bobby in Deliverance, but there’s no duelling banjos, just Mumford & Sons.

Have I missed any? What do you hate about gigs?

It pains me to side with an artist as innocuous as Ed Sheeran. I’ve never listened to an entire song, but the 15 seconds I’ve heard are enough to indicate that he’s far from being my cup of tea.

However, a sold out tour, triple platinum album and a handful of Brit nominations would indicate that he does have a few fans. And that’s fine for most of us, but not for the NME’s online editor, Luke Lewis, who last week decided that his disdain for Mr Sheeran had reached a tipping point.

I can understand it must be frustrating being Luke Lewis. When us mortals hear an artist we dislike, we avert our gaze. Whereas Luke has to not only endure the stream of tepid piss that comes shooting through the NME letterbox, but he’s often asked to write favourably about it.

Unsatisfied with fulfilling his role of informing 14 year olds who they should listen to, Luke felt that his contempt toward Ed Sheeran needed galvanising via a Twitter and Facebook campaign. The campaign of hate was imaginatively titled ‘How Shit Is Ed Sheeran?’, and came with a corresponding hashtag that would allow Luke to compile his results into an in-depth report, due today. The campaign garnered some truly gut-busting responses, the best of which were retweeted on the NME’s twitter page. Sadly, they’ve since been deleted. Indicative of a guilty conscience, or backtracking for fear of alienating quite a hefty number of their readership? Perhaps both?

No matter how you feel about Ed Sheeran, you have to admit that what Luke Lewis did was somewhat churlish. Not content with rating Ed Sheeran’s debut album and moving on, Luke and the NME retweeted bile without getting their own hands dirty. Their actions were tantamount to cyberbullying, despite Lewis’s protestations that his #HowShitIsEdSheeran campaign was, ‘Just a bit of Twitterfun’ (spoken like a true bully).

I viewed the activities of Luke and the NME as a desperate attempt to jump on a bandwagon of hatred; an effort to claw back some credibility in a climate of music journalism encumbered by irreverent blogs and message boards. But it doesn’t work like that when the musicians you chastise one week, you venerate the next. Furthermore, when that chastising is done on a national scale, the ginger-bashing’s quite pathetic, and wholly irresponsible.

Besides, having a publication as tired and irrelevant as the NME branding something as ‘shit’ is like the ocean calling rain ‘wet’.

Update: Luke Lewis has since issued an apology on his Facebook page.