Category Archives: Immortality

Photo: LiveLeak

A psychic in Thailand named Theprit Palee was in the middle of performing a traditional spirit dance in front of onlookers when he decided to stab himself in order to show that he is immortal. And lets just say that things did not go well.

The 25-year-old was performing the ritual that isbelieved to honor the ghosts of ancestors and this show involved Palee pressing the blade of a sword against his chest where it was supposed to break like it has broken in previous shows. Well something went wrong and the weapon failed to break, which of course led Palee to stab himself in the chest.

And unfortunately for Palee, he didnt make it as he was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Take a look at Palee performing this ritual thanks to theLiveLeak video below.

According to a resident, this psychic had provided readings to local people for several years.

This is a tradition that happens every year. The sword normally breaks but this time it went inside him, the resident said. The medium has been respected for many years. People love him. He is one of peoples favorites.

It is pretty sad that this guy died so young because of a freak accident. But if theres a lesson to be learned here it is to please dont point swords at your chest, kids. In fact, dont even pick up a sword. You are not onGame of Thrones.

h/t Metro

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Psychic Stabs Himself To Prove His Immortality And Then Dies - Crave Online

The sword is supposed to break during the act (Picture: Mercury)

A psychic medium has died after accidentally stabbing himself in the heart while trying to prove his immortality, it has been reported.

Theprit Palee, 25, had been performing the traditional spirit dance in front of spectators in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, yesterday afternoon when the accident occurred.

The folk ritual is believed to honour the ghosts of ancestors and in previous shows the blade of the sword broke when it was pressed against his chest.

But on this occasion the act went wrong and the weapon failed to snap causing the 25-year-old to stab himself in the chest.

The story was published bySanook.and English-language website Coconuts, which both reported that the medium was pronounced dead in hospital.

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According to a resident calledNoom Udorn, Mr Paleehad provided readings for several years to local people.

This is a tradition that happens every year. The sword normally breaks but this time it went inside him, he said.

The medium has been respected for many years. People love him. He is one of peoples favourites.

Deputy Police Inspector Chaiwat Phan said officersarrived at the San Kamphaeng district of the province at 3pm on April 24 and found the medium bleeding.

He said: We were informed that a man armed with a knife had stabbed himself. We are coordinating with the hospital while an autopsy is performed.

There were people at the scene helping Mr Palee but he died later in hospital. He had a stab wound to the chest.

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Psychic trying to prove his immortality stabs himself to death | Metro ... - Metro

George Bridges/Associated Press

Jimmer Fredette was surprised by how easy the transition was. He knew what he was getting into when he made the decision to move across the world from Denver to Shanghai. He'd spent a significant amount of time mulling over the decision to move to China, talking to several players about the transition, and the Shanghai Sharks, Fredette's Chinese Basketball Association team, set him up with a nice apartment. The research, the conversations and the accommodations all made the landing a bit smoother.

The food, however, would prove to be one of the toughest parts of the move.

Chinese food in China is wildly different from Chinese food in America, and Panda Express classics like General Tso's chicken and fortune cookies are nowhere to be found. Initially, cultural culinary differences didn't prove to be a problem. In Shanghai, the world's most populous city, Fredette could find anything he wanted to eat.When the Sharks began to hit the road, though, Fredette soon understood why he'd been warned.

"Once you got to different cities, it was like, 'Oh, I don't know what I'm going to do,'" Fredette tells Bleacher Report. "It was like, 'Pizza Hutshould I order that again?' I ate a ton of hard-boiled eggs and a lot of rice. I haven't eaten that since I've gotten home [to the United States]."

Whatever difficulties Fredette had with food, however, didn't hinder his abilities on the court. The former BYU star and 10th overall pick in the 2011 NBA draft, now known as the "Lonely God" overseas, tore up the CBA. He averaged 37.6 points per game while shooting 47.4 percent from the field and 39.6 from beyond the arc, and he took home both the All-Star game and league MVP awards. The accolades, combined with Fredette's 73-point performance in a February regular-season game, stirred up memories of Jimmermania, which swept the country during Fredette's senior year at BYU in 2010-11.

Interestingly, Fredette's numbers in the CBA compare favorably to several players who went to China and returned to the NBA. Cleveland Cavaliers guard J.R. Smith averaged 32.4 points per game on 49.7 percent from the field, while Wilson Chandler averaged 26.6 points on 45.7 percent from the field. The game in China perfectly suited Fredette's strengths. The CBA favors quick guards confident in their scoring abilities. Deep threes are taken regularly, and when an offensively skilled player travels overseas, they are given "the greenest of green lights," according to Andrew Crawford, writer for Chinese basketball website Shark Fin Hoops.

"Someone like Jimmer who is confident about his shot, that's perfect for him," Crawford says. "You can't be a shrinking violet in Chinese basketball. You're going over there and they're paying the money that they are, you have to be able to shoot and you have to be confident about your shot."

Fredette wanted an opportunity to showcase his abilities after toiling on the ends of NBA benches and D-League (now G-League) rosters for years. Fredette spent most of 2015-16 playing for the Westchester Knicks, scoring 21.1 points per game while shooting 45.8 percent, but he couldn't find the right opportunity stateside for 2016-17.

Feeling he'd accomplished all he could in the D-League, Fredette began looking overseas. When Jackson Emery, Fredette's teammate from BYU, heard his friend was heading to China, he was surprised.

"I was thinking a little more Europe. I thought he'd fit them better in terms of their lifestyle and wouldn't be as much of a culture shock," Emery says. "Once [Fredette] started talking to me about the shorter season, the money paid, the endorsement opportunities and the marketshare, it made more sense. He definitely made the right move."

Fans in China fell in love with Fredette and his performance for the Sharks, the former CBA home for Hall of Famer Yao Ming. The adoration of Fredette overseas reminded Emery and former BYU teammate Noah Hartsock of the madness of Jimmermania.

"It brought back Jimmermania a little to the states," Hartsock says. "Hopefully next year we'll see a 120-point game. That's what I'm waiting for. He's still Little Jimmo to us."

Fredette, while consideringoptions for next year, reportedly turned down a couple of 10-day contracts as opportunities to audition late in the season. His actions thus far indicate he's positioning himself for an NBA return.Thinking back to the heat of Jimmermania, Emery said that Fredette's career certainly hasn't gone as many teammates and friends expected.

"At the time, you had guys like Kevin Durant tweeting that he was the best scorer in the world. When you get guys like that tweeting, it's funny," Emery says. "Steve Kerr, that's the type of guy you thought Jimmer would be and the career he'd have. It's about fit and timing, and it hasn't felt like he's had the right fit or timing. That's why he's taking the time and thinking about it."

Emery, now a sales manager at Domo, a software company in Utah, sees Fredette as a business opportunity for any NBA team willing to take a chance. Beyond what he brings to the court, what Fredette brings with fans in the seats and jersey sales still holds value.

"Obviously he knows he's not Russell Westbrook ... but he thinks he can be Raul Neto for the Jazz. He can bring five to 10 minutes, hit some shots and contribute," Emery says. "I'm a Utah Jazz fan and I wondered why teams wouldn't bring in Jimmer to sell jerseys at the very least. There is value from what he can do on and off [the court]."

"I compare him to Tim Tebow. People didn't want to play around with the Tebow circus. You feel like there's a similar sentiment around Jimmer."

A return to China, however, could prove to be equally, if not more, lucrative. Foreign players can become legends in the CBA, as evidenced by the success of Stephon Marbury, who now has a museum in Beijing and is a naturalized citizen of China. Crawford says Fredette could prove to be equally successful if he continues playing at a high level.

"There is a legacy of overseas players coming over and committing themselves to a team and it goes over really well in that city," Crawford says. "If Jimmer came back and stayed in Shanghai and kept the success going, he would create an enormous legacy."

Those are the two paths present-day Jimmer Fredette can choose from: a chance to potentially become a bench player in the NBA or an opportunity to become a legend halfway across the world.

"I envisioned myself being a great basketball player in the NBA. I felt like I had the skill set to be able to do that," Fredette says. "I can shoot the ball and score the ball in today's NBA with the three-point shot. I had some great times in the NBA, I had some not-so-great times, but it's something that I've continued to work towards and not let it keep me down."

All quotes obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.

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Jimmer Fredette Has a Decision: Immortality in China or Role Player in America - Bleacher Report

Those who know Jeff Hastings well say he is the last person to take credit for anything, no matter how hard hes worked or how much hes accomplished.

Recognition is not something the Norwich native seeks out, despite an accomplished career in ski jumping as an athlete and an Olympic broadcaster with NBC.

Thats a difficult thing to keep up when others see you as a vital centerpiece for a sport in the process of rebuilding its national image.

Hastings was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame on April 8 in Stowe, Vt. The honor, Hastings said this week, caught him completely off-guard.

Its a hard thing to have a reaction to, he said. Ski jumping has been a huge part of my life since forever. To get recognition like this, its something I never could have dreamed of. Its an enormous honor.

Hastings, a Hanover High graduate, began skiing at 4 years old and was part of the Ford Sayre ski jump program in Hanover growing up. He attended Williams College in Massachusetts to continue his ski jumping pursuits before joining the U.S. Ski Team. Hastings qualified for the 1984 Olympic Games in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, where he finished in fourth place, setting a modern American record. He also is a four-time U.S. national ski jumping champion.

After his Olympic stint, Hastings took to the broadcast booth, where he has worked as a network ski jumping expert at every Olympics since the 1992 Games in Albertville, France. That streak will come to an end next year at the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, but Hastings, 57, said hes happy that hes been able to stay involved in the sport for so long.

(Broadcasting) is not something that comes naturally to me, he said. To have that front-row seat with a credential, to watch the sport up close and watch its athletes develop, to keep that connection to the sport was really exciting to be a part of.

Rex Bell, a ski jumping coach for the U.S. team from 1980-88, lauded Hastings for his contributions to the sport.

Jeff is one of the most successful ski jumpers of all time. Certainly in the modern era. He and Mike Holland are the best ski jumping athletes the U.S. has ever produced, Bell said. Beyond his success on the playing field, so to speak, hes someone who has meant a tremendous amount to the sport in the form of developing and creating programs.

The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association cut funding for ski jumping in 2010 and Nordic combined events in 2014. Bell the vice chairman and member executive of USA Nordic, the organization now responsible for developing future ski jumpers and Nordic combined athletes said Hastings was heavily involved in getting it started.

The way of thinking, the culture, is in large part shaped by Jeff and his attitude, Bell said. When we talked about whether to go ahead and form this organization and what the priorities should be, we agreed that one of the big focuses should be on the grassroot programs and to really get back to the basics.

Jeff was the most passionate, he added. He really took it upon himself to create all these really cool, fun programs to help recruit kids and keep them involved. Hes been doing it all this time, quietly and behind the scenes, not asking for help.

Hastings has helped organize the USANS Story Project, a ski jumping and Nordic combined blog where he acts as a curator for shared photos and stories throughout the season.

Hes also helped start an online event called Virtual Nationals, where youth athletes from across the country submit videos of their jumps to be judged by former and current Olympians.

The sport of ski jumping is kind of a niche sport. Its certainly a minor sport, Bell said. But were beginning to see, in part because of the programs Jeff has created and the efforts of this organization providing advance training opportunities, success at the international level.

Outside of the sport, Hastings has used his organizational skills for philanthropic purposes. He devised the Childrens Hospital at Dartmouth Hero Half Marathon while he was a volunteer board member for Friends of CHaD in 2006, and now serves as its race director.

Not only is he a ski Hall of Famer, hes also a CHaD Hero Hall of Famer, said Sharon Brown, director of community relations at CHaD. Hes continued to not only be the brains, but the brawn. ... Its our single biggest event; last year we raised $800,000.

Its an amazing event because Jeff keeps pushing us to think bigger, better, stronger, she added.

Hastings, who works full-time at Pro-Cut International in Lebanon, said he is looking forward to putting more of a focus on family and work and that watching the Olympics next year will be surreal after so many years on the air.

I think we hit bottom and were coming back, Hastings said of ski jumping. Its an incredibly unique sport, an individual sport in a team environment. Its a lot like life. Youre not competing against other people, youre competing alongside them. ... Its never going to be football or golf; it wouldnt be suited for that. But it will continue in pockets. Its a great sport for parents and kids.

Josh Weinreb can be reached at jweinreb@vnews.com or 603-727-3306.

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Soaring Into Immortality: Norwich Ski Jumper Enters Hall of Fame - Valley News

Rose Byrne, Oprah Winfrey.

Rose Byrne, Oprah Winfrey.

Rene Elise Goldsberry.

Rene Elise Goldsberry.

Oprah Winfrey.

Oprah Winfrey.

Henrietta Lacks story gains greater immortality in HBO film

The story of Henrietta Lacks and the long and ultimately successful campaign to identify her posthumous contributions to medical science is so emotionally compelling, it would take complete incompetence not to tell it well in a TV film.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the HBO film based on the book by Rebecca Skloot and airing Saturday, April 22, has been created with more than competent direction, writing and performances. Its an emotionally powerful film that does justice to Lacks, her legacy and her family.

When Lacks died in 1951 of cervical cancer, cells from her body were preserved by doctors at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and were found to have the ability to live and multiply outside the body. Labeled HeLa (from the first two letters of the decedents first and last names), they have been used ever since for medical research around the world. Yet Lacks descendants never received any compensation, even as companies and doctors profited from breakthroughs enabled by the HeLa cells.

The HBO film tells the story of how research by Skloot (Rose Byrne) for a book on Lacks led her to her family, including her daughter Deborah, who went by Dale. Dale is played to stunning perfection by Oprah Winfrey, who snapped up the rights to film Skloots book even before it was published.

Dale is a complicated and often cantankerous woman, and like other members of her family, naturally distrustful of a young white reporter asking questions about her mother. Only 2 when her mother died, Dale is desperate to know more about who her mother was, but she is given to mood swings, often certain that Skloot is looking to make a buck off Lacks story.

The campaign to find out what happened to Lacks takes Skloot and Dale to the tiny tobacco town of Clover, Va., where Henrietta Lacks lived, to the cemetery where she is buried in an unmarked grave, to the home of other family members, including Dales best friend and cousin, Sadie (Leslie Uggams). Piece by piece, the women put Lacks story together.

Throughout the film, written by director George C. Wolfe with Alexander Woo and Peter Landesman, moments of the past and the brief life of Lacks (Rene Elise Goldsberry) flash into view. As the film progresses, we learn more about Lacks and who she was, the revelations paralleling Dale and Skloots exhaustive, challenging search.

The performances are extraordinary on every level. In addition to Uggams, Goldsberry and Winfrey, the film boasts great work from Courtney B. Vance as an oily con man named Sir Lord Keenan Coefield; Rocky Carroll as Dales older brother, Sonny; and Reg E. Cathey as Zakariyya, Dales younger brother.

Byrnes Skloot feels more like a plot convenience than a three-dimensional character in the first half of the film, but she finds her footing after she and Dale learn to fully trust each other.

Henrietta Lacks achieved a kind of immortality after her death. But Skloots book and, now, this gripping film adaptation will ensure that the world knows who she was.

David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle and co-host of The Do List every Friday morning at 6:22 and 8:22 on KQED-FM, 88.5 FM in San Francisco, 89.3 FM in Sacramento. Follow him on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Dramatic film. 8 p.m. Saturday, April 22, on HBO.

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Henrietta Lacks' story gains greater immortality in HBO film - SFGate

A friend and fellow Pagan priest recently came across this quote at a local hospital:

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal. Albert Pike, American Freemason

Its a beautiful quote and its place outside a hospital is very appropriate. But while it is clearly true (the second half, at least), it raises the question of whether thats the only form of immortality.

There are those who believe the contemplation of immortality is a colossal waste of time. All we know for sure is that we have this one life. Surely we should focus our attention on making it the most we can and worry about what comes next when this life is done.

Yet to be human is to live with the realization that we are alive but some day we will die. Life will go on for those who remain until their time also comes but we will be gone.

We mostly live with this certainty by ignoring it. But for those of us who are mindful of such things, we wonder: will we really cease to exist? Or will we live on, in one form or another? Philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people have contemplated this question for at least as long as weve been human. There are many answers, some of which are more likelythan others.

As for me, I see three forms of immortality.

This is what Albert Pike was talking about what we do lives on after us. Pike achieved this form of immortality he was an extremely influential figure in American Freemasonry, especially within the Scottish Rite. The very wealthy have long endowed education and the arts, looking to have their names attached to beneficial institutions that live on for centuries after them. This past fall we were reminded of the deeds of the women who won the right to vote and Susan B. Anthonys grave became a shrine. Ross Nichols and Isaac Bonewits live on in me and in many other contemporary Druids.

It is not only what we have done for others that remains. Shakespeares Mark Antony said the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. Pike achieved this form of immortality as well. He fought for the Confederacy and threatened to leave Freemasonry rather than accept black men as brothers. Jack the Ripper appears to be immortal I hope the far-more-deadly 20th and 21st century mass murderers fade into obscurity instead.

We need not be famous or infamous to live on in our deeds. Rich mens names may be on the buildings, but carpenters and stonemasons live on in the structures built by their labor. Parents and teachers live on in the children who learn from them.

Our world is more interconnected than we can imagine. Every day our lives touch the lives of others, impacting and influencing them in ways that are sometimes unnoticeable and sometimes overwhelming. Those impacts and influences will remain long after we have moved on to whatever comes next.

Our deeds make us immortal.

Daniel OConnell Monument Dublin, Ireland

We will die, but our blood kin will go on. Even if like me we leave no physical offspring, we have nieces and nephews and cousins of various degrees and levels of removal. Our families of blood continue.

So do our families of choice: our networks of close friends, our social and political organizations, and especially our religious communities. Ross Nichols lives on in OBOD and Isaac Bonewits lives on in ADF.

This is not the same as the immortality of our deeds. We do not live on in our families because we were influential or even because we were loved. We live on in our families because we were a part of them, and the whole continues even if a part of it dies.

This is a difficult concept for modern Westerners whose sense of identity rests firmly in the individual and not in the group. The liberal Christian theologian Paul Tillich called this the courage to be as a part. He said it is the participation in something which transcends death, namely the collective, and through it, in being-itself (The Courage to Be, 1952).

What if your family line dies out? Just remember that if you go back far enough, every living person is related (and for that matter, so is every living creature). Your name may die, but your family continues.

Because our families live on, we are immortal.

The first two forms of immortality require no religious beliefs, just a way of thinking that is bigger than ourselves. But when most people talk about immortality theyre thinking of the immortality of themselves as individuals. Call it consciousness, call it the soul whatever it is that makes you you. Does it live on?

The only completely honest answer is that we dont know. If you have examined the evidence and have come to the conclusion that it does not, or that the question is unimportant, know that I respect your beliefs. But I have come to a different conclusion.

We see the concept of life after death in almost every culture and tradition. We see it in the earliest human burials with grave goods why would people who had almost nothing bury useful objects with the dead unless they were sure the dead would need them? We see it in the tomb-shrines of Northwestern Europe and in the pyramids of Egypt. We see it in the beliefs and practices of many of the worlds remaining tribal cultures, and in the beliefs and practices of our friends and neighbors. Perhaps this near-universal belief simply reflects a near-universal fear of death and non-existence. For me, though, its one more reason why I believe we live on.

There are near death experiences and past life memories. Yes, there are rational explanations for them, and some of those explanations are probably true. But some experiences defy rationalization.

Ive had my own past life experiences. Some were part of a deliberate attempt to remember, while others came spontaneously. I have no way of knowing if these memories are authentic or if theyre imagined, but they feel right, and they go a long way in explaining why I am the way I am. So as with so much else that cant be proved one way or the other, I order my life as though the memories are authentic, even though I cant be sure.

Ive also had other, more powerful spiritual experiences. These have been so real and theyve happened enough times even I cant be skeptical about them any more. They have not specifically addressed the form that the immortality of the soul takes (Otherworld? Reincarnation? Some combination of the two?), but I am completely convinced there is more to Life than the material world, and that the soul whatever that is never dies.

I cannot prove this to you. I can only tell you what Ive done, and what others like me have done. Experiences like this come in their own time and not when we demand them, and even then it is up to us to interpret them authentically.

But Im convinced our souls are immortal.

The time to contemplate death and what comes afterwards is not when we are old and sick and death is imminent. These things are best contemplated on a beautiful Spring day when you are healthy and all is right in the world, or at least in your little corner of it. So let us consider immortality and the forms it might take.

This we know: our deeds make us immortal.

This we know: because our families live on, we are immortal.

If thats enough for you, Im happy for you. Seriously if youre good with that, it makes your life a lot simpler. If thats as far as your worldview will allow you to go, I respect your choices.

But this I know: my soul will live on.

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Three Forms of Immortality - Patheos (blog)

Good Friday seems a suitable day to consider the fact that, in an era in which life expectancy everywhere has almost doubled, humankind is more confused than ever aboutdeath. Nearly half of the British population supposes that death is complete annihilation; an almost equal number still believes in some form of life after death, and, for a subject notably lacking in eyewitness data, a surprisingly small proportion, less than 10%, acknowledge they do not know what happens. Meanwhile, in California but also elsewhere, there are enormously rich men who believe that death is a problem witha technological solution which they hope to live to profit from.

Ideals of technological immortality come in two sorts. There are those who hope that their bodies will be preserved or at least prolonged almost indefinitely, usually by freezing. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the present technology allows brains to be frozen and rethawed without being reduced to a unworkable state. To hope that this will be changed by some future breakthroughs is an act of faith at least as remarkable as supposing that Jesus rose from the dead. That belief was at least marked since its earliest appearance by a saving ambiguity about what it might actually mean. Saint Paul, for example, was absolutely certain it had happened but nowhere managed to explain what it materially might have been.

The second kind of technological immortality presumes an immaterial soul a pattern of electrical and chemical activity that can be copied from brains into silicon and then reactivated, either inside a computer or transferred back into a conveniently available human brain. Possibly both: one contemporary science fiction novel, Cory Doctorows Walkaway, takes the idea of personalities as computer programs to its logical consequence, and envisages multiple copies of the same program the same person running simultaneously on different networks. This is the closest anyone will ever get to the fantasy of cloning identical human beings.

These approaches to the afterlife differ from most of the world religions in that they have no moral aspect. Perhaps to the believers it is a moral quality to be rich enough to afford such fantasies, but to the rest of the world it looks like a giant leap backwards. This amoral approach to immortality reaches back to a world before the great proselytising world religions. Christianity, Islam and Buddhism all have conceptions of an afterlife which will make up for injustice before death. This was an important novelty. Most other religious systems, if they had any concept of an afterlife, had one without justice. The twittering shades whom Odysseus fed with blood were not being punished for anything except being dead. The nearest that a ghost can come to justice is a craving for revenge. Although belief in heaven and hell can gratify that craving, so that a Christian journalist, outraged by the slaughter of Christians in Egypt this week, consoles himself that the murderers will suffer a thousand times worse in hell, it has also served to underpin a concept of justice wider than revenge and capable of bringing an end to reprisals.

A belief in heaven and hell tends to enforce social norms, discouraging cheating on the one hand, but also holding the potential to make this life pretty hellish for those who fall outside the norms for any reason, including gay people. Social liberalism often goes hand in hand with a rejection of the afterlife, but so does destructive libertarianism. If this life is all we have, success before death is the only kind worth having. But who is to judge that success if not posterity? This itself implies a kind of afterlife. To evoke posterity is to weep on your own grave, as Robert Graves pointed out, and if you are truly dead you cannot leave your grave to weep on it.

Suppose, though, that the tech billionaires get their wish. Would they be happy then? Theyd certainly be envied. Immortality is after all a promise that people are prepared to die for, whether in expectation of heaven, or of some earthly miracle that will revive their frozen corpses. The possessors would certainly be prepared to kill to retain it. But once attained, at whatever cost to the rest ofus, would it satisfy?

The prospect of a life infinitely prolonged becomes after some time the prospect of infinite futility. Its often said that heaven would be extremely boring because all the interesting people end up in hell. But even the company of saints would be preferable tothat of the disciples of Ayn Rand.

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The Guardian view on immortality: not for the faint-hearted - The Guardian

This article comes from Den of Geek UK.

Few horror films have been as closely studied and intimately dissected as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The simple story of a family ripped apart by the effects of a remote, haunted hotel, Kubrick's film has only grown in mystique since its release in 1980. Clearly, there's far more going on below the surface, but what does Kubrick's imagery and symbolism - much of it unique to the film, and absent from Stephen King's source novel - actually mean?

Rodney Ascher's superb 2012 documentary Room 237 pulled together some of the more outlandish theories about The Shining. It's Kubrick's veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the 1969 Moon landings, goes one line of thinking. No, it's an allusion to the horrors of World War II and the holocaust, says a different theorist. Wrong again, another voice suggests: it's a retelling of the Minotaur myth. Often, these theories are based on incidental background details - a home-knit Apollo 11 jumper, the specific make of a typewriter, a tin of baking powder, a poster that looks a bit like a mythical beast if you squint hard enough.

There's a richness and attention to detail and ambiguity in Stanley Kubrick's movies that invites this kind of close study, though few films in his career have sparked quite so many varied readings as The Shining. To an already crowded list, we offer an additional theory: The Shining's about the immortality of evil.

Kubrick embarked on The Shining in the wake of 1975's Barry Lyndon, his glacial period film which, despite its reputation today, was a critical and financial failure at the time. The director therefore threw himself into a more commercial project: an adaptation of The Shining. Stephen King's novels had made him phenomenally popular in the late 1970s, and King was among a generation of storytellers who took horror out of the castles and capes of Dracula and Frankenstein and into the modern era.

King's novels Carrie (1974) and 'Salem's Lot (1975) took paranormal powers and vampirism into the 20th century, just as such hit films as Rosemary's Baby (based on the novel by Ira Levin) and The Exorcist (adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own book) had introduced a classier, more contemporary brand of horror in cinemas.

When Kubrick took on The Shining, he was therefore following a fashionable trend among respected filmmakers. Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, and Nicolas Roeg had all crafted deeply individual horror films in the 60s and 70s. The decade also introduced such wayward talents as Wes Craven (Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes), Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), and David Cronenberg (Shivers, Rabid).

When Kubrick started work on The Shining, he showed off the work of another upcoming filmmaker he greatly admired: Eraserhead, the surreal, immensely disturbing debut by David Lynch. The Shining would, of course, wind up being wildly different from Eraserhead's monochrome hellscape, yet Kubrick evidently appreciated how Lynch used sound and imagery to create an oppressive atmosphere of dread.

To Stephen King's later chagrin, Kubrick wasn't particularly interested in adapting The Shining beat for beat. For one thing, the filmmaker didn't have much time for stories of ghosts and the afterlife - something Kubrick told King in no uncertain terms one day in the late 70s.

As King recalled in one hilarious anecdote, Kubrick called King up at 7:00 am one morning - completely out of the blue - and said, "Hi. Stanley Kubrick here. I actually think stories of the supernatural are optimistic, don't you?"

King, hung over, covered in shaving cream, two kids screaming in the background, gripped the telephone and murmured, "I don't exactly know what you mean by that."

"Well," Kubrick replied, "supernatural stories all posit the basic suggestion that we survive death. If we survive death, that's optimistic, isn't it?"

King asked, "Well, what about hell?"

There was a long, ominous pause, like the silence after a thunderclap.

"I don't believe in hell," Kubrick said, and hung up.

Kubrick therefore set about reworking his own vision of The Shining with screenwriter Diane Johnson, using only the basic framework of King's story. A husband, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their young son Danny (Danny Lloyd), who has telepathic powers, spend the winter at the Overlook, a hotel located in the mountains of Colorado. The husband, Jack intends to use the weeks of seclusion to write a novel. The malevolent spirits in the hotel, on the other hand, have other ideas. As strange apparitions manifest themselves to both son and father, Jack's already threadbare sanity begins to unravel...

The shoot of Kubrick's The Shining was legendarily difficult, as the filmmaker's exacting methods took their toll. Nicholson and Duvall were required to provide take after take - a pivotal stairway confrontation between the pair was shot anywhere from 45 to 125 times depending on whose account you believe. Scatman Crothers, who plays the hotel chef Dick Hallorann, spent so long reciting his lines in front of the camera that he eventually lost his temper with Kubrick.

By the time filming had concluded in 1979, Kubrick had spent about a year at Elstree Studios, obsessing over individual scenes and tiny details. As cast and crew began to crack under the pressure of all the script rewrites and long work days, it must have felt at times as though the production itself was descending into madness.

If critics struggled with The Shining when it finally emerged in 1980, then maybe that's because it didn't adhere to the conventions of a typical horror movie. The Overlook's supernatural threat - if it exists at all in the movie - is kept ambiguous. Its pace is slow and deliberate; and unlike the Jack Torrance in King's book, who's initially presented as a flawed yet likeable character before the ghosts get to him, Jack Nicholson's protagonist is fairly cold and sinister before he even sets foot in the Overlook.

This latter point is surely deliberate, however. Kubrick's implication is that, far from being corrupted by the evil presence in the Overlook, Jack Torrance is simply given license by it. The evil's already present in Jack - it merely takes a few nudges from the Overlook's remote location and ghostly echoes to bring it out into the open.

The Shining's opening credit sequence could be read as the first hint at this. As Wendy Carlos' doom-laden electronic music plays in the background, a helicopter shot follows the Torrance family's journey through the Colorado countryside in their car. The camera becomes a detached, floating spirit, hovering over or just behind the central characters - much as it does through the rest of the film in those celebrated Steadicam shots Kubrick so insistently employs. Evil is following.

In King's novel, there's the suggestion that the Overlook has somehow sucked up the evil things that have taken place within its walls. Kubrick goes a step further, with a character's line that the hotel was built on an old Indian burial ground implying that the presence may be older than the structure itself. And if we follow the theory that The Shining isn't about ghosts, but about evil, then this certainly makes sense. Evil doesn't inhabit buildings, it inhabits human beings - even ordinary, unremarkable ones, like Jack Torrance.

There's plenty of support from Kubrick to support this reading of the film; in Paul Duncan's Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films, the filmmaker said:

"There's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly."

Stephen King was certainly confronting his own demons when he wrote his novel. The inspiration from The Shining came to him during a stay at The Stanley Hotel in Colorado, where King fused a stay in the real room 217 - supposedly haunted - with the difficulties he was having as a father of two young children.

"Sometimes you confess," King said in The Stephen King Companion, published in 1989. "You always hide what you're confessing to. That's one of the reasons why you make up the story. When I wrote The Shining, for instance, the protagonist [...] is a man who's broken his son's arm, who has a history of child beating, who is beaten himself. And as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward my children..."

The Shining therefore de-emphasizes the moving topiary animals and ghosts of the novel and focuses the story more squarely on Jack Torrance's growing capacity for violence. The Overlook becomes a place where, away from the gaze of society, moral laws are suspended, and Jack is given license to do all the things he's long fantasized about.

As Jack drunkenly confesses to Joe Turkel's impassive barman, Lloyd, he'd already subjected his young son to violent abuse before he even set foot in the Overlook:

"For as long as I live, she'll never let me forget what happened. I did hurt him once, okay? But it was an accident. Completely unintentional [...] a momentary loss of muscular coordination."

The Shining then ties the evil of domestic violence to evil in a more general sense. Evil doesn't just reside in Jack; it's everywhere. As the sinister Delbert Grady (Philip Stone) tells Jack, "You've always been the caretaker. I've always been here."

The references to the genocide of Native Americans, as picked up by other theorists, could tie into The Shining's theme of evil presenting itself in different ways. The elevator doors opening, the blood gushing up, seemingly from the foundations of the Overlook itself, could be a symbol of the hotel's grim past - and the country as a whole.

In the same scene with Jack quoted above, Delbert Grady uses a racial slur to describe Dick Halloran that strikes out of the film like an ice pick - an example of another kind of evil that sticks to our species like a leech. Perhaps this is what Jack means by the odd, apparently throwaway line: "White man's burden." If we don't feel guilty about the skeletons in our species' closet, then maybe we should.

Away from The Shining, Kubrick's films frequently explored the darker continents of human nature - particularly the destruction wrought by flawed men. His adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita was about the horrors wrought by a sexual predator. At its heart, Dr. Strangelove was about how a world led by neurotic, sexually repressed men might be obliterated by nuclear weapons. A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket both dealt explicitly with violence and dehumanization.

The Shining could therefore be seen as a continuation of those themes: a continuation of the things "inherently wrong with the human personality," but in a horror context. It's not the ghosts in haunted houses we should be afraid of, Kubrick seems to suggest, but the demons that lurk within ourselves.

Time and again, the director returns to the symbol of the maze: the hedge maze in the Overlook garden, the incomprehensible network of corridors in the building itself. This is The Shining's lasting, chilling implication: the blacker sides of human nature are hardwired into our DNA. Inextricable. Inescapable.

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The Shining and the Immortality of Evil | Den of Geek - Den of Geek US

Saskatchewan's Joel Gagnon, shown competing with the Minnesota Gophers, has had a gymnastics element named after him. Courtesy Minnesota Athletics/Christopher Mitchell/SportShotPhoto.com

Saskatchewans Joel Gagnon, unlike the rest of us, has his own move.

Its documented, codified, immortalized. People all over the world are trying it; theyre sending him video links via Instagram.

Try it sometime: Head to the closest parallel bars, and perform, as the International Gymnastics Federation puts it, a basket roll backwards with tuck salto half to upper arm hang.

Youve just performed The Gagnon named by the federation after its inventor, a kid from Saskatchewan, and placed into the mens gymnastics Code of Points.

Someone came up to me this weekend, relates Gagnon, a third-year gymnast with the University of Minnesota Gophers who is freshly returned from the Big 10 championship.(He was) one of the photographers, and he said, Ive been shooting that skill all season. I didnt realize it was named after you. Its one of those little comments that make you happy. You know its kind of a big deal.

Gagnon, who grew up in Regina before moving to Saskatoon to train with the Taiso Gymnastics Club in Grades 11 and 12, is the first Saskatchewan gymnast to have a skill named after him.

He invented it late last summer, while working on a different skill at a gym in Montreal. He was having difficulties, and made his own variation an extra half twist, instead of an extra flip, and that moved it off the books and into uncharted territory.

I was lucky enough to be scheduled to go to my first World Cup in Hungary a month and a half after that, he says. It was pretty good timing, if I could master the skill quickly. I knew there was a chance of getting it named after me. It all happened pretty fast. Before I knew it, I was competing in Hungary, and now its named after me.

Before Gagnon could perform the unknown move in competition, it had to be submitted to meet officials. They gave it a difficulty value of C, which carries a points score of 0.3.

Later, it went to a technical committee at the International Gymnastics Federation. Last week, they announced that The Gagnon is one of eight new elements, all performed at World Cup events in 2016 and 2017, to be published in the mens Code of Points.

It is a way, the Federation noted in its preamble, of achieving immortality in gymnastics. The gymnast who has an original skill named after them in the Code of Points assures that his or her name will live on in the sport, years after they have taken their final bows on the international stage.

Its incredible, says Gagnon, an aspiring Olympian and aerospace engineer who is also on Canadas national gymnastics team.

Its almost surreal to have my named attached to something that will be in the Code of Points forever. I can say I left a legacy, or my mark, on the sport in some way. Its something you dream about, but its not something you think will ever happen, because you have to have the stars align in the right way you come up with a skill, and are able to compete it at the high level required to get it named after you.

Gagnon is now working to refine the element. Since introducing it, hes done the move with legs tucked, but hes now trying it with legs splayed. Hes been using it just about every weekend at NCAA competitions.

He laughs when asked to evaluate that first public display of The Gagnon, at the Szombathely World Challenge Cup in Hungary.

It was the best anyones ever done it, he said wryly. It wasnt perfect. It was clean, well-executed. I could have had a bit more rotation on it, so theres still improvement, which is good.

Gagnon, who first started in the sport as a four-year-old in Regina, remains a Taiso member while working towards his goal of competing at the 2020 Olympics and, maybe, of using his element there.

Hes juggling all that, and his aerospace engineering studies, while noting that they do have at least one thing in common.

Both of them are very challenging, Gagnon said. Anytime youre learning something new in the gym, theres a lot of analysis going on what can I do to fix this; what can I do to catch this release move or stick this landing? It takes a lot of patience, a lot of time, a lot of thought, a lot of dedication, a time commitment. Both (gymnastics and engineering) have those same trends.

With all that said, he continues to work on a variation of The Gagnon. Perhaps, he muses, he can try another new element in international competition, and theyll immortalize The Gagnon 2.

Ill still try to innovate, to be creative and maybe get another skill one day, he says.

kemitchell@postmedia.com

twitter.com/kmitchsp

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Saskatchewan gymnast Gagnon finds immortality in a name and a skill - Saskatoon StarPhoenix

Few horror films have been as closely studied and intimately dissected as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The simple story of a family ripped apart by the effects of a remote, haunted hotel, Kubrick's film has only grown in mystique since its release in 1980. Clearly, there's far more going on below the surface, but what does Kubrick's imagery and symbolism - much of it unique to the film, and absent from Stephen King's source novel - actually mean?

Rodney Ascher's superb 2012 documentary Room 237 pulled together some of the more outlandish theories about The Shining. It's Kubrick's veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the 1969 Moon landings, goes one line of thinking. No, it's an allusion to the horrors of World War II and the holocaust, says a different theorist. Wrong again, another voice suggests: it's a retelling of the Minotaur myth. Often, these theories are based on incidental background details - a home-knit Apollo 11 jumper, the specific make of a typewriter, a tin of baking powder, a poster that looks a bit like a mythical beast if you squint hard enough.

There's a richness and attention to detail and ambiguity in Stanley Kubrick's movies that invites this kind of close study, though few films in his career have sparked quite so many varied readings as The Shining. To an already crowded list, we offer an additional theory: The Shining's about the immortality of evil.

Kubrick embarked on The Shining in the wake of 1975's Barry Lyndon, his glacial period film which, despite its reputation today, was a critical and financial failure at the time. The director therefore threw himself into a more commercial project: an adaptation of The Shining. Stephen King's novels had made him phenomenally popular in the late 1970s, and King was among a generation of storytellers who took horror out of the castles and capes of Dracula and Frankenstein and into the modern era.

King's novels Carrie (1974) and 'Salem's Lot (1975) took paranormal powers and vampirism into the 20th century, just as such hit films as Rosemary's Baby (based on the novel by Ira Levin) and The Exorcist (adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own book) had introduced a classier, more contemporary brand of horror in cinemas.

When Kubrick took on The Shining, he was therefore following a fashionable trend among respected filmmakers. Roman Polanski, William Friedkin and Nicolas Roeg had all crafted deeply individual horror films in the 60s and 70s; the decade also introduced such wayward talents as Wes Craven (Last House On The Left, The Hills Have Eyes), Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and David Cronenberg (Shivers, Rabid).

When Kubrick started work on The Shining, he showed off the work of another upcoming filmmaker he greatly admired: Eraserhead, the surreal, immensely disturbing debut by David Lynch. The Shining would, of course, wind up being wildly different from Eraserhead's monochrome hellscape, yet Kubrick evidently appreciated how Lynch used sound and imagery to create an oppressive atmosphere of dread.

To Stephen King's later chagrin, Kubrick wasn't particularly interested in adapting The Shining beat for beat; for one thing, the filmmaker didn't have much time for stories of ghosts and the afterlife - something Kubrick told King in no uncertain terms one day in the late 70s.

As King recalled in one hilarious anecdote, Kubrick called King up at 7.00am one morning - completely out of the blue - and said, "Hi. Stanley Kubrick here. I actually think stories of the supernatural are optimistic, don't you?"

King, hung over, covered in shaving cream, two kids screaming in the background, gripped the telephone and murmured, "I don't exactly know what you mean by that."

"Well," Kubrick replied, "supernatural stories all posit the basic suggestion that we survive death. If we survive death, that's optimistic, isn't it?"

King asked, "Well, what about hell?"

There was a long, ominous pause, like the silence after a thunderclap.

"I don't believe in hell," Kubrick said, and hung up.

Kubrick therefore set about reworking his own vision of The Shining with screenwriter Diane Johnson, using only the basic framework of King's story. A husband, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their young son Danny (Danny Lloyd), who has telepathic powers, spend the winter at the Overlook, a hotel located in the mountains of Colorado. The husband, Jack intends to use the weeks of seclusion to write a novel; the malevolent spirits in the hotel, on the other hand, have other ideas. As strange apparitions manifest themselves to both son and father, Jack's already threadbare sanity begins to unravel...

The shoot of Kubrick's The Shining was legendarily difficult, as the filmmaker's exacting methods took their toll. Nicholson and Duvall were required to provide take after take - a pivotal stairway confrontation between the pair was shot anywhere from 45 to 125 times depending on whose account you believe. Scatman Crothers, who plays the hotel chef Dick Hallorann, spent so long reciting his lines in front of the camera that he eventually lost his temper with Kubrick.

By the time filming had concluded in 1979, Kubrick had spent about a year at Elstree Studios, obsessing over individual scenes and tiny details. As cast and crew began to crack under the pressure of all the script rewrites and long work days, it must have felt at times as though the production itself was descending into madness.

If critics struggled with The Shining when it finally emerged in 1980, then maybe that's because it didn't adhere to the conventions of a typical horror movie. The Overlook's supernatural threat - if it exists at all in the movie - is kept ambiguous. Its pace is slow and deliberate; and unlike the Jack Torrance in King's book, who's initially presented as a flawed yet likeable character before the ghosts get to him, Jack Nicholson's protagonist is fairly cold and sinister before he even sets foot in the Overlook.

This latter point is surely deliberate, however. Kubrick's implication is that, far from being corrupted by the evil presence in the Overlook, Jack Torrance is simply given licence by it. The evil's already present in Jack - it merely takes a few nudges from the Overlook's remote location and ghostly echoes to bring it out into the open.

The Shining's opening credit sequence could be read as the first hint at this. As Wendy Carlos' doom-laden electronic music plays in the background, a helicopter shot follows the Torrance family's journey through the Colorado countryside in their car. The camera becomes a detached, floating spirit, hovering over or just behind the central characters - much as it does through the rest of the film in those celebrated Steadicam shots Kubrick so insistently employs. Evil is following.

In King's novel, there's the suggestion that the Overlook has somehow sucked up the evil things that have taken place within its walls. Kubrick goes a step further, with a character's line that the hotel was built on an old Indian burial ground implying that the presence may be older than the structure itself. And if we follow the theory that The Shining isn't about ghosts, but about evil, then this certainly makes sense. Evil doesn't inhabit buildings; it inhabits human beings - even ordinary, unremarkable ones, like Jack Torrance.

There's plenty of support from Kubrick to support this reading of the film; in Paul Duncan's Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films, the filmmaker is quoted as saying:

"There's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly."

Stephen King was certainly confronting his own demons when he wrote his novel. The inspiration from The Shining came to him during a stay at The Stanley Hotel in Colorado, where King fused a stay in the real room 217 - supposedly haunted - with the difficulties he was having as a father of two young children.

"Sometimes you confess," King said in The Stephen King Companion, published in 1989. "You always hide what you're confessing to. That's one of the reasons why you make up the story. When I wrote The Shining for instance, the protagonist [...] is a man who's broken his son's arm, who has a history of child beating, who is beaten himself. And as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward my children..."

The Shining therefore de-emphasises the moving topiary animals and ghosts of the novel and focuses the story more squarely on Jack Torrance's growing capacity for violence. The Overlook becomes a place where, away from the gaze of society, moral laws are suspended, and Jack is given licence to do all the things he's long fantasised about.

As Jack drunkenly confesses to Joe Turkel's impassive barman, Lloyd, he'd already subjected his young son to violent abuse before he even set foot in the Overlook:

"For as long as I live, she'll never let me forget what happened. I did hurt him once, okay? But it was an accident. Completely unintentional [...] a momentary loss of muscular coordination."

The Shining then ties the evil of domestic violence to evil in a more general sense. Evil doesn' t just reside in Jack; it's everywhere. As the sinister Delbert Grady (Philip Stone) tells Jack, "You've always been the caretaker. I've always been here."

The references to the genocide of Native Americans, as picked up by other theorists, could tie into The Shining's theme of evil presenting itself in different ways; the lift doors opening, the blood gushing up, seemingly from the foundations of the Overlook itself, could be a symbol of the hotel's grim past - and the country as a whole.

In the same scene with Jack quoted above, Delbert Grady uses a racial slur to describe Dick Halloran that strikes out of the film like an ice pick; an example of another kind of evil that sticks to our species like a leech. Perhaps this is what Jack means by the odd, apparently throwaway line: "White man's burden." If we don't feel guilty about the skeletons in our species' closet, then maybe we should.

Away from The Shining, Kubrick's films frequently explored the darker continents of human nature - particularly the destruction wrought by flawed men. His adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita was about the horrors wrought by a sexual predator. At its heart, Dr Strangelove was about how a world led by neurotic, sexually repressed men might be obliterated by nuclear weapons. A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket both dealt explicitly with violence and dehumanisation.

The Shining could therefore be seen as a continuation of those themes: a continuation of the things "inherently wrong with the human personality", but in a horror context. It's not the ghosts in haunted houses we should be afraid of, Kubrick seems to suggest, but the demons that lurk within ourselves.

Time and again, the director returns to the symbol of the maze: the hedge maze in the Overlook garden, the incomprehensible network of corridors in the building itself. This is The Shining's lasting, chilling implication: the blacker sides of human nature are hardwired into our DNA. Inextricable. Inescapable.

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The Shining and the immortality of evil - Den of Geek UK