Shadowlessness

Tu vash misht. Tu vask misht. Grushdeva du kalt misht.

Surrender your flesh.
Surrender your will.
Your vengeance is through me…

Everything was ready. The ordinary razor blade was broken in two to provide better grip and control, the tissue papers to dry the blood that would be running shortly, the ash tray to gather the excess blood and soaked tissues, the lit candle for the hot wax that he would use later to fill the holes and stop the bleeding. It was another night and another nightly ritual.
Removing the nail on the big toe is not easy. He had done this many many times over the past 13 years, and his technique had improved substantially from just trying to yank and break off some part of the toe nail to methodically dissecting and twisting it out piece by piece.
Tonight was the projected night for him to remove the remaining bottom half of the nail. He would start by making a vertical incision in the nail with the razor blade. Before razor blades, he had tried several different knives, and while saw knives (knives with jagged edges) worked acceptably, none were comparable to the ease that razor blades sliced nails, like a hot knife through butter. He started with the vertical cut, right down the middle of the toe nail to cut it into two side-by-side pieces. He knew from experience exactly how thick the toenail was, yet he had to be very careful with the depth of the cut. If he made it too shallow, his nail would not be cut in two and it wouldn’t be easy to remove completely. And if he made it too deep, he would cut into the sensitive flesh underneath and the bleeding would obscure his view and get into his way and he would have to postpone the “procedure”. But cutting the visible part of the nail was not enough. Anybody who’s ever worked with nails knows that they run long beneath the flesh at the base of the nail. He knew that he had to cut two to three millimeters of the skin and flesh covering the hidden part of the nail to be able to slice that part. The fact that the base of the nail was softer and less brittle did help, but it also meant that the nail would be attached and interleaved with flesh and harder to remove completely. He needed to cut some flesh as well, although not nearly as much as one pound, but here he was allowed the extraction of blood, vein and sinew along with the flesh.
Although he was experienced, he couldn’t help but nick the toe while doing the vertical cut anyway. He did not care about the blood and he didn’t feel the throbbing pain after so many years and so many rituals, but the blood did get in his way. He dried up the blood with the tissues and went right back to work. He needed to remove the whole nail this time. If he didn’t make the cut all the way down to the stem of the nail, some part of it would remain in the depths of the toe and would grow into the skin and flesh and would fester there. He didn’t care about the festering, but he would be annoyed because he would not have access to the nail for a long time which pissed him off.
After several minutes, he managed to make the vertical incision all the way through to the base and soft part of the nail. He then started carefully lifting the two parts of the nail up and out, like opening a hatch in the ground. From this point on, there was no avoiding the blood-flow. Bits of tissue (the kind that is part of your body) would be stuck too hard to the underneath of the nail and would be ripped off as it came up. He did it fast, using a pincer to grab the now slippery nail and take it out. If you try something like that, don’t pull the nail up (along the Y axis of your body, towards your head. Do it along the X axis (to your right or left.) It requires more force, but the result is a cleaner severance. He did it first with the right section and then the left. The procedure took six or seven minutes from start to finish.
He did not wipe off the blood that was bubbling now. He lay back and extended his feet and let the blood stream down his foot, down from the corner of where his nail used to be. The bleeding tow looked like an empty eye socket, in half a face, weeping blood.

Just installed the WP-Syntax plugin. Let’s see how it works…

 
template <bool Expr>
struct StaticAssert
{
    enum {value = Expr};
};
 
template <>
struct StaticAssert<true>
{
    enum {value = true};
};
</true></bool>

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

// Line numbers!
template <bool Expr>
struct StaticAssert
{
    enum {value = Expr};
};
 
template <>
struct StaticAssert<true>
{
    enum {value = true};
};
</true></bool>

For future reference, I used the following HTML to put code in a post or comment. You can (and are encouraged to) too!

<pre lang="cpp|html|python|..." line="0|1">
</pre>

Or more aesthetically pleasing:

</pre> 

The supported language names are:
abap, actionscript, ada, apache, applescript, asm, asp, autoit, bash, blitzbasic, bnf, c, c_mac, caddcl, cadlisp, cfdg, cfm, cpp-qt, cpp, csharp, css, d, delphi, diff, div, dos, dot, eiffel, fortran, freebasic, genero, gml, groovy, haskell, html4strict, idl, ini, inno, io, java, java5, javascript, latex, lisp, lua, m68k, matlab, mirc, mpasm, mysql, nsis, objc, ocaml-brief, ocaml, oobas, oracle8, pascal, per, perl, php-brief, php, plsql, python, qbasic, rails, reg, robots, ruby, sas, scheme, sdlbasic, smalltalk, smarty, sql, tcl, text, thinbasic, tsql, vb, vbnet, vhdl, visualfoxpro, winbatch, xml, xpp, z80