The Sorcerer's Apprentice

I was recently lunching with a friend, and the conversation turned to matters of the uncanny and inexplicable. I quoted, as I always do in this context, Hamlet's line to Horatio about there being more things in Heaven and Earth than poor Horatio dreams of in his philosophy. My friend then astonished me by giving, as her example of such an inexplicable phenomenon ...spoon-bending.

She's an intelligent person, who works mostly with computers, so you can imagine my perplexity. At that moment I was very glad that one of my youthful hobbies was magic: nothing prepares you better for a lifetime of spotting hokey old tricks dressed up as New Age miracles. Anyone with the slightest practical acquaintance with conjuring would instantly spot spoonbending as a trick - it's one of the purest examples of the most fundamental principle of conjuring, misdirection. When you need to bend the spoon, just create a diversion, and by the time everyone looks back, Hey Presto! If you're doing your job right, everyone there will swear blind that they never took their eyes off the spoon for an instant.

But I think I'm even more shocked by the persistence of something that I would have thought was by now just a 1970s pop-culture tag, an answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. By the way, I see that celebrity spoonbender Uri Geller has bought the family home of Elvis Presley on eBay. It must have been on Platinum Reserve.