Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

The New Year has started in fine style, the media setting the tone for 2011 with the gripping headline:
‘I was groped by Donald Duck'.

It is said that truth is stranger than fiction and I doubt that we could have made up a whackier title for a story if we had tried. And we do try. Every week in a special corner of SunLive, the daily news website, there are stories that are not true.
‘Not the News' is a satirical look at life around us, especially the stories in the news.
Our intrepid reporter Cliff Edge certainly doesn't let the facts get in the way of a good story; or a good parody. Occasionally he is assisted by the lovely Mel Function and other members of the ‘Not The News' reporting team; whose names we haven't made up yet.
We expect they will be having a ball with the ‘Donald Duck Groped Me' saga.
It started with the allegation from a Pennsylvania woman that while visiting a Florida theme park, Donald Duck grabbed her breast and then joked about it. She is suing, of course (it's America) and claims Disney parks have a history of ‘fondling complaints'.

Get your fix
Anyway, to get your fix of satire, parody, and just good (not always so clean) fun, check out ‘Not the News' on the SunLive.co.nz homepage. And if you haven't discovered SunLive yet, then this is your lucky year!
SunLive is the complete instant, daily news service for the Bay of Plenty and Coromandel, updated constantly every day. You can save a fortune on newspaper subscriptions, because all the news and information is available free. Make it your New Year's resolution to save a heap by cancelling unnecessary subs!
Best of all, SunLive is faster than traditional old news delivery concepts. Major stories are updated as they happen. Readers can comment on every news story, and comment on the comments. It's all very easy, fresh, interactive and up-to-the-minute.
Make it your homepage, that way you get a news update every time you switch on.
And when you've checked out the blogs, columns, photos, news; you can also check out ‘Not the News'.

Pronunciation debate
Meanwhile, debate has been raging all summer in the RR Headquarters over the correct pronunciation of the year 2011. Some say it is two thousand and eleven, while others insist that it should be ‘twenty eleven'.
We've undertaken exhaustive surveys amongst the RR community of alert readers and report that consensus is leaning towards the shorter, sharper ‘twenty eleven' option.
Many of those also believed that last year was better pronounced as twenty ten.
Overwhelming evidence is cited from last century; when the years were dubbed, for example, ‘nineteen ninety eight.' We would not have dreamed of calling 1998 by its longer title, ‘one thousand nine hundred and ninety eight,' would we?
That doesn't even sound like a year, more like the number of times the average citizen screamed when Snoopy's Christmas plagued its way over the radio last month. Or the number of politicians who have taken a free holiday while pretending to work for us.

Urban myths
So there it is, people. 2011 is officially Twenty Eleven. You read it first here, and because you read it, it must be true, right?
Not so. It seems the number of wild urban myths out there is expanding in proportion to the growth of the internet.
Fortunately, there are ways of finding out whether stories that sound too incredible are actually correct. The website Snopes.com
is a great mythbuster. Before you send on those ‘amazing' chain email stories, do a quick check on Snopes so you are sure you're not being suckered into perpetuating yet another urban legend.
Of course, if you read it in ‘Not the News' you can be certain that it is not true. Cliff Edge takes great pride in planting the seeds of some of the greatest urban legends ever made up. (At least they will be, when you start passing them off to your mates as fact.)
Sadly, however, some individuals continue to suffer because of the relentless march of the Urban Myth phenomena – including our feathered fantasy friend, Donald Duck.
For many years it was said that he was banned from Finland for not wearing pants and not being married to Daisy.
Our information is that this is yet another myth – Donald was merely a victim of funding cuts; the Finnish authorities stopped subsidising the cartoons in the seventies. There was no ban.
Still, you can't be too careful. Never trust a duck without pants.

In the meantime, we are establishing a ‘Fondling Complaints' department here at RR Headquarters and sincerely hope we get some cases to investigate soon.