Do you remember the impertinent email featuring a fetus-munching Oriental oddity which circulated the web community sometime in 2001?

I was a terribly neurotic medicated mess the time this godforsaken 'urban legend-posing-as-reality' bull was hot.

A college friend forwarded me the dang email one dog day afternoon. I fumed and my spleen shot up my one nostril that I emailed her back a very sarcastic and contrary 'Nice one'.

I have a problem with obsession-compulsion so on the third day of brewing over it, I did a series of research.

I learned that the photographs of an alleged Oriental man munching on a barbecued fetus were actually created by a Chinese surrealist named Zhu Yu.

Zu Yhu exhibited these photographs in some underground art show after the Shanghai 2001 Bienniale curators slapped the rejection papers to his schizo face believing that such an art is too controversial (what is plain controversial and too controversial, anyway?)

The very controversial piece is entitled, Eating People (literally, mind you) and Zhu Yu stressed, perhaps to only shove himself down further the cuckoo hole, that he stole the fetuses from a medical school and actually feasted on them for "art's sake".

Cute.

Alarmed by Zhu Yu's supposed cannibalism, Scotland Yard and the FBI conducted an investigation (of course, the superhero-compex stricken FBI of America must always be involved or we could all plunge to hell hole). Know-it-alls later argued that Zhu Yu could have easily constructed his 'fetuses' from doll parts and animal carcasses and fooled half the world into imagining that the whole baloney is actually authentic.

My personal conclusion is, Zhu Yu must have seen too much of the Twighlight Zone or he probably was going through his formative years when the Jeffrey Dahmer trial was on BBC every night.

Or perhaps he is just one of them artistes--profound and misunderstood beings from the planet of blah.