Uri Geller And The Mighty Spoon-Orilla

by | May 18, 2014

Uri Geller, the Israeli self-described “mystifier” who spent decades impressing the credulous with his supposed psychic and telekinetic powers, really likes his spoons. The “short biography” on his website recounts that a spoon “curled up in his hand and broke, although he had applied no physical pressure to it” when he was five years old. Spoon-bending later became the adult Uri Geller’s signature demonstration of his telekinetic gifts. He would take spoons and other items of cutlery in hand and gently stroke them until they yielded to his psychic powers, bent like rubber, and even broke!

In recent years Geller has had to tone down his claims a little, and has been reduced to such minor exploits as buying “an uninhabited lump of volcanic rock in the Forth of Firth” that he apparently believed to be connected in some obscure way to Egyptian pyramids and the Knights Templar. However, the affinity for tableware clearly remains. Last year, Geller commissioned a statue of a gorilla made entirely of spoons for the gardens of his home in Berkshire, England, “where he already has a Cadillac covered in spoons”.

Geller, who opens his gardens to charity five times a year, said he chose a gorilla because he owns five paintings by a chimpanzee.

Why not choose a chimpanzee, then? Would Geller have commissioned a statue of a dugong if he owned five paintings by a manatee, for heaven’s sake? I am clearly incapable of comprehending the subtle workings of a mystically endowed mind such as his.

In any event, the mighty spoon-orilla has now been completed. Sculptor Alfie Bradley originally estimated that a mere 5,000 spoons would be needed for the project, but the final total turned out to be more like 40,000. People generously sent spoons from all over the world, and Geller personally contributed a spoon that had been owned by Winston Churchill. He was apparently delighted with the final product, too.

“I am not going to look at the gorilla too hard in case the spoons bend,” he added.

The firm that built the statue seem to have been infected with Geller’s cutlery fetish. They now hope to create an “angel made of knives donated by gang members”. Presumably they’ll move on to forks next, and then to metal chopsticks (which in my experience are too smooth to be really practical, compared to the more common ones made of wood or bamboo) for the sake of knee-jerk cultural inclusiveness. Meanwhile, I await reports of the first British gangster to be cut down with humiliating ease and swiftness by some rival because he reached for his trusty knife only to think “oh dear, I donated it to the people who were building that bloody angel…”

I don’t know if Uri Geller has ever bent a metal chopstick, but bending small metallic objects in general is apparently not so difficult. A skeptic might even say that being able to perform the feat hardly demonstrates any telekinetic talent at all.

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