Did you hear the one about ...

Come Dine with Me. Superficial.

You probably saw the one about the guy who cut everything he and his partner owned in half when they split up to honour the letter of the property agreement between them. You could read about it everywhere.

It's less likely you saw the subsequent disclosure that this did not happen but was actually part of a promotion for a legal specialist in matrimonial disputes.

Among other boons brought to us by the internet have been the opportunities it provides to connoisseurs of gullibility.

In some circles, pointing out that what you have just been breathlessly told by someone is untrue, rather than eliciting gratitude, can earn you a reputation as a bit of a smart-arse, especially at dinner with teenagers.

But it's hardly surprising such yarns are taken on face value. The property split saga is just one example of a litany of similarly far-fetched stories that circulate all the time and are all too plausible. There are many others that I am working hard to prove are internet-borne urban myths.

Some stories have a science fiction theme, such as the one about the planet that is slowly but surely poisoning itself and driving a large percentage of its species, if not its own race, to extinction. In a great surprise twist, faced with irrefutable evidence of this, the people of that planet continue the practices that caused the problem in the first place.

Many of these stories are obviously calculated to confirm the general public's worst suspicions about the superficiality and cynicism of the media.

These include such rib ticklers as: Seven Sharp is a real programme; someone in charge of a broadcasting network can talk about "snackable content" with a straight face; Mike Hosking is the most powerful man in television - the ultimate snack, if you will; Come Dine with Me.

Other yarns purport to show that human nature is anything but natural. Such as the one about a land of plenty with abundant resources and relatively high levels of comfort and freedom that refuses to admit more than a handful of desperate people trying to escape countries where cruelty and oppression, disease and starvation are all they know.

Then there are those that seem contrived merely to test credibility, such as the one about a proud country with great traditions that, when it found out its most important national symbol was pretty much identical to that of another country responded by shrugging its national shoulders and saying "Yeah, nah - got more important things to worry about." And yet, didn't do anything about the more important things either.

Okay, you got me. I'm pulling your leg - all those are true, even the one about Mike Hosking. It sure is confusing.

By the way, if you saw the story this week about the KFC that served up a battered rat, I hope you saw the follow-up about the DNA test that proved the alleged rodent was merely an unfortunately shaped piece of chicken.

Speaking of gullibility, I don't know enough about jobs whose KPIs include fast-talking and scooter-riding to be able to comment on whether disgraced popinjay Alex Swney was being underpaid - which he cited as the reason he started helping himself to other people's money. But the principle is an intriguing one.

What if nurses, who I do know are underpaid, adopted his philosophy? Hospitals would run out of drugs in no time.

Or teachers? Kids would come home from school having been shaken down for their lunch money.

That said, having followed the parallel careers of Swney and his free-standing hairstyle for some time, I'm confident that whether or not he was underpaid, his hairdresser was certainly overpaid.