Enjoy karaoke? Like mingling with several beautiful people who all look identical? A fan of nun-based musicals?

Then have we got an offer for you! Thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber deciding that someone from Hollyoaks – we don't know which one, they all look so similar – is to be the new Maria in The Sound Of Music, Hollyoaks has decided to do a Hollyoke competition, where the winner will end up being an extra on Hollyoaks and hanging out with all the famous Hollyoaks stars like Jambo and Bombhead and that boy who got bum-raped on a car.

But to even stand a chance of becoming a Hollyoaks extra you need to upload a video of you performing karaoke to one of a handful of songs. Your video will be judged by the Hollyoaks cast and the winner will end up hanging around on the set of Hollyoaks, unsuccessfully trying to convince themselves that they're even a tenth as attractive as anyone else there, even the hairy-cracked on-set carpenter.

If you want more information on how to enter, then visit the Hollyoaks Hollyoke page. Good luck. 

Sadly, most of us aren’t going to be rock stars and will only have Guitar Hero as the next best thing.

You won’t be playing for crowds of thousands at Wembley. Instead the biggest crowd you’ll rock out to will be your grandma and her mates as they gather round for their coffee morning whilst you show them you’ve mastered the hard setting whilst blindfolded. No drug-fuelled orgies will commence, no groupies begging you for love sessions in a Travelodge so they can then tell the News Of The World you only have a two-inch penis.

Sadly this is all just a dream, but now the most unlikely of sources is going to offer you some sort of way of fulfilling your rock n roll dreams. Poor Missy Elliott has a problem, you see. She’s gone and recorded her new album and doesn’t know what to call it.

Oh dear, perhaps the thought of lazily calling it after one of the tracks didn’t quite click with her, but we’ll let her off the hook this time. So she’s offered you the chance to do it for her! All you have to do is visit her website, fill in a few details and you could have your own effort printed on thousands of albums across the world. But that’s not all: 

“The grand prize winner will receive their name in the credits of the album packaging that will be in stores across the world! Missy will also hook you up with an Adidas – Respect Me prize pack!” 

See if you can do better then our effort – Hecklerspray Made Me Do It.  

Well you never know, she did record a song called Get Ur Freak On after all. 

Read more:

Missy Needs Your Help! – Missy Elliott

In this post-feminist landscape, beauty contests are more about displaying a united spirit of sisterhood than anything else – well, that and attacking your competitors with pepper spray to stop them winning, as Ingrid Marie Rivera has found out.

Ingrid Marie Rivera, you see, is going to be Puerto Rico's representative at next year's Miss Universe competition. But her journey has been fraught with more peril than anyone could have imagined because rather than Vaseline her teeth and make up a lot of bullshit about animals like all other wannabe Miss Universes do, Ingrid Marie Rivera had to cope with someone sabotaging her clothes and make-up with pepper spray before the show began. And by struggling through the pageant covered in hives and emerging as Miss Puerto Rico, Ingrid Marie Rivera has proved that nothing can stand before her ultimate goal of wearing a sash, smiling subordinately and being found attractive by Donald Trump for a year.

You might think that beauty contests are nothing more than awkward anachronisms that merely reduce women to subservient objects of male desire while offering the illusion of empowerment judged on nothing more than a series of intergenerational genetic flukes, but you would say that wouldn't you, fatty?

Because even though beauty contests are just jumped-up dog shows where you don't feel as suicidal if you find the winner attractive, people go crazy for them. Especially Miss Universe, where previous winners have subjected themselves to dresses made of chains and relentless Mexican jeers just so they can win the ultimate prize of being called the prettiest girl in the universe, travelling to hopeless war-torn environments to inspire the locals with their beauty and getting drunk, taking drugs and banging all the men. 

And people will do anything to even compete in Miss Universe – anything, it's transpired, including sabotaging your competitors with pepper spray attacks before they're due to go onstage.

That's what's happened in Puerto Rico, anyway – on Friday's beauty contest to find Puerto Rico's representative for Miss Universe 2008, the ultimate winner Ingrid Marie Rivera was forced to keep running backstage to change clothes and ice her face to stop it from swelling up, all because someone had doused her clothes and make-up with pepper spray. After she won, and revealed the torment she'd been through, Ingrid Marie Rivera said:

"It was a lot of sacrifice, and my tears were genuine. At one point, I asked, 'Am I a masochist?' But I said regardless of the results, this is my goal. The more rocks there are in my path, the more thanks I will give to God for sustaining me."

There's currently an investigation into who would dream of attempting to wreck Ingrid Marie Riviera's hope of winning the Miss Puerto Rico crown by covering her with pepper spray, and investigators have narrowed the culprit down to either a team member of one of Riviera's competitors or Dennis The Menace from The Beano.

And not only was there the pepper spray that Ingrid Marie Rivera had to endure, but also her bags and credit cards were reportedly stolen and a bomb threat cancelled some of the Miss Puerto Rico preliminary rounds.

But while the investigation into this sabotage continues, some important questions have to be asked. Like what would compel someone to cause another human being so much distress just because they might be slightly prettier than them? Is it a reflection of the increasingly competitive world we live in, or is it a sign that the media constantly inflicts unattainably high ideals on us that destroy our self-confidence as a result of our failure to meet them?

But perhaps the most important question is this: how frighteningly ugly must the other Puerto Rican beauty queens have been to let sobby old Ingrid Marie Rivera and her welty face win Miss Puerto Rico? We're guessing 'quite'.

Read more:

Puerto Rican Wins Beauty Contest Despite Sabotage – Reuters