Zeta Quotes

When the Zetas fill the sky, Will our leaders tell us why? Fully loaded satellites, Will conquer nothing but our minds.

No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from their lives either. They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quiet private lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all of them are called Zem.

Wulfe leaned in. "Where did you send Ms. Benoit?" "Disneyland." "Who knows my connection to the Zetas?" "The US Marshall Service, SWAT, my dentist, Oprah---" "How did you know we were coming? Clearly, someone tipped you off." "That guy." Zach points with a jerk of his head toward of of Wulfe's minions. The man looked uncertainly at Wulfe, taking a step backward. "He text me just before you stepped in the elevator.

Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to life again.

I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it's completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who don't have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it.

Even the smallest actions of a friend can make a big difference. — Zeta Davidson —

I heard the opening bar of 'Help' as I headed down Polk Street. Every single time I've heard that tune I've taken it as some message from God, a warning of things to come, a perfect description of my mashed-potato character

I was a good man once, but there's just no getting past the truth. I began by fighting monsters but in the process, I became one myself. There's no going back. The darkness still lies inside me. Sated by a lake of blood, and a universe of screams, it will always be there, black and brooding evil. AJ Adams, Dark Hunter

We'd fought and fucked, but I'd never kissed Rip before. At first he froze, completely astonished, and then his arms were synching around me, pulling me close. His lips were warm, firm, and sweetly exploring. It felt absolutely, totally right. I sank into that kiss, feeling as if I'd come home.

LA VIDA NO ES LA QUE VIVIMOS. LA VIDA ES EL HONOR Y EL RECUERDO. POR ESO MAS VALE MORIR CON EL PUEBLO VIVO, Y NO VIVIR CON EL PUEBLO MUERTO. Life is not as it seems, Life is pride and personal history. Thus it is better that one die and that the people should live, rahter than one live and the people should die. ~Lopitos

What most people don’t understand about lawyers is that they’re all scared shitless to actually fight with one another.

And the truth of the matter is that death is a mystery to me. I have no opinion on the subject.

A hippie is like a cockroach. So are the beatniks. So are the Chicanos. We’re all around, Judge. And judges do not pick us to serve on Grand Juries

And when he roared into your driveway at night, you knew he was bringing music, whether you wanted it or not.

I eat chunky little boys like Sean Hannity for lunch.” True enough, Keller thinks. This woman faced down the goddamn Zetas. “We

Dark rumblings inside told him he was in a tremendous amount of trouble. He didn't know how it was going to manifest or when but it was coming, sure as Zeta would break the horizon before everyone else arose from their sleepzone. If they hauled him away, then what?

In my opinion, defining intelligence is much like defining beauty, and I don’t mean that it’s in the eye of the beholder. To illustrate, let’s say that you are the only beholder, and your word is final. Would you be able to choose the 1000 most beautiful women in the country? And if that sounds impossible, consider this: Say you’re now looking at your picks. Could you compare them to each other and say which one is more beautiful? For example, who is more beautiful— Katie Holmes or Angelina Jolie? How about Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones? I think intelligence is like this. So many factors are involved that attempts to measure it are useless. Not that IQ tests are useless. Far from it. Good tests work: They measure a variety of mental abilities, and the best tests do it well. But they don’t measure intelligence itself.

It’s a little something extra I call the Zeta Factor. Y’know Catherine Zeta-Jones, right? Oscar winner, trophy wife, bipolar beauty. Well, take away the Zeta and she’s just ol’ Cathy Jones. Ain’t nobody wanna be no Cathy Jones. No, thank you. Ya gotta throw some fuckin’ Zeta into your life and make it sparkle.

high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die.… Hunter

Firewater brings out the real brownness of this buffalo.

L’umanità è stata sedotta e abbandonata da una divinità artificiale e macchinosa, capace di offrire palliativi e non risposte, rabbia anziché comprensione, impassibilità invece di speranza.

When I couldn’t take the hunger anymore, I called Taylor and told her everything. She screamed so loud, I had to hold the phone away from my ear. She came right over with a black-bean burrito and a strawberry-banana smoothie. She kept shaking her head and saying, “That Zeta Phi slut.” “It wasn’t just her, it was him, too,” I said, between bites of my burrito. “Oh, I know. Just you wait. I’m gonna drag my nails across his face when I see him. I’ll leave him so scarred, no girl will ever hook up with him again.” She inspected her manicured nails like they were artillery. “When I go to the salon tomorrow, I’m gonna tell Danielle to make them sharp.” My heart swelled. There are some things only a friend who’s known you your whole life can say, and instantly, I felt a little better. “You don’t have to scar him.” “But I want to.” She hooked her pinky finger with mine. “Are you okay?” I nodded. “Better, now that you’re here.” When I was sucking down the last of my smoothie, Taylor asked me, “Do you think you’ll take him back?” I was surprised and really relieved not to hear any judgement to her voice. “What would you do?” I asked her. “It’s up to you.” “I know, but…would you take him back?” “Under ordinary circumstances, no. If some guy cheated on me while we were on a break, if he so much as looked at another girl, no. He’d be donzo.” She chewed on her straw. “But Jeremy’s not some guy. You have a history together.” “What happened to all that talk about scarring him?” “Don’t get it twisted, I hate him to death right now. He effed up in a colossal way. But he’ll never be just some guy, not to you. That’s a fact.” I didn’t say anything. But I knew she was right. “I could still round up my sorority sisters and go slash his tires tonight.” Taylor bumped my shoulder. “Hmm? Whaddyathink?” She was trying to make me laugh. It worked. I laughed for the first time in what felt like a long time.

Seduto nella stanza 217 della Scatola, Brady fissa la videata iniziale di Pesca nello stagno. Ha lo sguardo vigile e consapevole. È l'espressione che nasconde a tutti tranne che a Felix Babineau. Ormai il primario riveste una minima importanza. Quasi non esiste. È diventato il Dottor Zeta. "Scapelli, spostiamoci in cucina", ordina Brady. La donna cerca di resistergli, ma inutilmente.

Well, what do you think?” said Ford. “It’s a bit squalid, isn’t it?” Ford frowned at the grubby mattresses, unwashed cups and unidentifiable bits of smelly alien underwear that lay around the cramped cabin. “Well, this is a working ship, you see,” said Ford. “These are the Dentrassis’ sleeping quarters.” “I thought you said they were called Vogons or something.” “Yes,” said Ford, “the Vogons run the ship, the Dentrassis are the cooks; they let us on board.” “I’m confused,” said Arthur. “Here, have a look at this,” said Ford. He sat down on one of the mattresses and rummaged about in his satchel. Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to life again.

I have no desire to be a politician. I don’t want to lead anyone. I have no practical ego. I am not ambitious. I merely want to do what is right. Once in every century there comes a man who is chosen to speak for his people. Moses, Mao and Martin are examples. Who’s to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices. Perhaps that is why the gods have sent me into Riverbank, Panama, San Francisco, Alpine and Juarez. Perhaps that is why I’ve been taught so many trades. Who will deny that I am unique? For months, for years, no, all my life I sought to find out who I am. Why do you think I became a Baptist? Why did I try to force myself into the Riverbank Swimming Pool? And did I become a lawyer just to prove to the publishers I could do something worthwhile? Any idiot that sees only the obvious is blind. For God sake, I have never seen and I have never felt inferior to any man or beast.

with simultaneous wars in Baja, Tamaulipas, and now Michoacán. Keller has to admit that the violence is unprecedented. Even at the height (the depth?) of Barrera’s war against Güero Méndez, back in the ’90s, the fighting was sporadic—brief sudden peaks of violence—not a daily event. And not spread across three broad areas of the country, with multiple and interconnected antagonists. The Alliance fighting Teo Solorzano in Baja. The Alliance fighting the CDG/Zetas in Tamaulipas.

The Riemann zeta function was a simple enough looking infinite series expressed in terms of a complex variable. Here, “complex” means not difficult or complicated, but refers to a variable of two distinct components, “real” and “imaginary,” which together could be thought to range over a two-dimensional plane. In 1860, Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann made six conjectures concerning the zeta function. By Ramanujan’s time, five had been proven. One, enshrined today as the Riemann hypothesis, had not

„You see?“ said the official, examining the ultra-titanium outer seals the aorist rod hold. „ Perfectly secure, perfectly safe.“ He said the same thing as they passed holds containing chemical weapons so powerful that a teaspoonful could fatally infect an entire planet. He said the same thing as they passed holds containing zeta-active compounds so powerful that a teaspoon could blow up a whole planet. He said the same thing as they passed holds containing theta-active compounds so powerful that a teaspoon could irradiate a whole planet. „I‘m glad I‘m not a planet,“ muttered Zaphop.

Since I was about ten years younger than this crew of alcoholics, I just listened and filled their cups with cheap wine. After they’d had enough, I’d tell them of my escapades in Riverbank and in Panama where I’d worked with the Southern Baptist Convention and Jesus Christ to save the black souls of niggers, spics and Indians. I used to keep my eye on Harris when I told my stories. He had this nasty habit of pulling out a little notebook in the middle of a conversation and jotting down, as he said, “story ideas.” Later on, after I’d transferred to S.F. State and taken his writing course, he asked me if I wanted to read his first draft of Wake Up, Stupid! I kept it for a week and returned it to him at the next short story seminar. I only read the first paragraph. After that, I was no longer afraid of the intellectuals. I knew I could tell a better story.

It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals. I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home—in an aluminum saucepot—and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face. The notion that anyone would believe Catherine Zeta-Jones as an obsessively perfectionist chef (particularly given the ridiculously clumsy, 1980s-looking food) in the wretched film No Reservations made me want to vomit blood, hunt down the producers, and kick them slowly to death. (Worse was the fact that the damn thing was a remake of the unusually excellent German chef flick Mostly Martha.) On Hell’s Kitchen, when Gordon Ramsay pretends that the criminally inept, desperately unhealthy gland case in front of him could ever stand a chance in hell of surviving even three minutes as “executive chef of the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant” (the putative grand prize for the finalist), I’m inexplicably actually angry on Gordon’s behalf. And he’s the one making a quarter-million dollars an episode—very contentedly, too, from all reports. The eye-searing “Kwanzaa Cake” clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help it. I wish, really, that I was so far up my own ass that I could somehow believe myself to be some kind of standard-bearer for good eating—or ombudsman, or even the deliverer of thoughtful critique. But that wouldn’t be true, would it? I’m just a cranky old fuck with what, I guess, could charitably be called “issues.” And I’m still angry. But eat the fucking fish on Monday already. Okay? I wrote those immortal words about not going for the Monday fish, the ones that’ll haunt me long after I’m crumbs in a can, knowing nothing other than New York City. And times, to be fair, have changed. Okay, I still would advise against the fish special at T.G.I. McSweenigan’s, “A Place for Beer,” on a Monday. Fresh fish, I’d guess, is probably not the main thrust of their business. But things are different now for chefs and cooks. The odds are better than ever that the guy slinging fish and chips back there in the kitchen actually gives a shit about what he’s doing. And even if he doesn’t, these days he has to figure that you might actually know the difference. Back when I wrote the book that changed my life, I was angriest—like a lot of chefs and cooks of my middling abilities—at my customers. They’ve changed. I’ve changed. About them, I’m not angry anymore.

Then I go over to attend to my client whose fine hair clings to her scalp. ‘Now,’ she says, prodding a picture in the magazine. ‘I was thinking of something like this. A big, glamorous Catherine Zeta-Jones kinda thing. That all right with you?

Francis Ford Coppola, Winston Churchill, Ted Turner, Catherine Zeta-Jones and I all have something in common. We are all bipolar.

El Chayo, El Chango y La Tuta diseñan con singular astucia su separación de Los Zetas. A mediados de 2006 formalizan el nacimiento de una nueva organización llamada La Familia Michoacana, cuyo objetivo es expulsar a Los Zetas de la Tierra Caliente.

Los Zetas son la punta de lanza de la expansión del Cártel del Golfo hacia Michoacán en el año 2001. La expansión es consecuencia de una idea estratégica de Osiel Cárdenas: quiere abrir una ruta de tráfico que una el Pacífico y el Golfo para tres negocios. Primero, la mariguana y la amapola que se cultivan en las barrancas michoacanas. Segundo, las anfetaminas que son la mercancía de moda y han hecho la fortuna de un cártel local, asociado a los Arellano Félix. Tercero, el control del puerto industrial Lázaro Cárdenas, el mayor del Pacífico, por el que pueden llegar todas las cosas necesarias para el tráfico, empezando por la cocaína sudamericana, terminando por la seudoefedrina, precursor químico de las drogas de diseño cuyo comercio está prohibido en los Estados Unidos pero permitido en México. Osiel quiere ir de Michoacán a Tamaulipas para evitar el paso por las ciudades del noroeste y el norte, rumbo a Tijuana y Ciudad Juárez, que no controla. Quiere dirigir el flujo hacia las ciudades fronterizas tamaulipecas, que en principio son suyas.

En los siguientes meses, la feria de ejecuciones de la guerra entre La Familia Mexicana y Los Zetas sacude al estado. Este es el litigio de sangre que decide la intervención del presidente Felipe Calderón en Michoacán, en los primeros días del año de 2007, el primer paso de lo que será un proceso sostenido de operativos militares y policiacos en gran escala para contener al crimen organizado durante el gobierno de Calderón (2006-2012) y hasta ahora.

La intervención militar en Michoacán tiene el efecto buscado de contener la espiral de homicidios pero el efecto no buscado de golpear más a Los Zetas que a la Familia Michoacana, dejando a esta quedarse con el campo y garantizar, con su propio ejercicio de captura del territorio, cierta estabilización de la violencia, incluso cierto clima de tranquilidad pública, pero en el contexto subterráneo de un más amplio dominio criminal.

In the summer of ’67, as a buffalo on the run,

Who are you?” Dave demanded. “I am Mobius,” said the computer. “I am the artificial intelligence who runs Colony Zeta. More commonly known as the End.” “Listen, bozo,” said Carl, “we’re not in the mood for any stupid speeches or quests. And if you’re a secret bag guy, just go ahead and kill us now because we don’t have any armor or weapons.

Déjame entrar a tu íntimo alfabeto... Déjame entrar a tu íntimo alfabeto para saber lo tuyo por su nombre y a través de tus letras hablar de lo que permanece y también de auroras y de nieblas Déjame entrar para aprenderte y girar en tu órbita de voces hablándote de lo que me acontece describiéndote a ti Quiero dar testimonio a los hombres de tus enes y tus zetas desnudarte ante ellos como una niña para que todos se expresen con acento puro.

David finally drifted off, the gentle smell of her hair filling his head, the soft, warm breeze of her breath on his arm a lullaby for his unsettled soul.

He takes my hand, placing it over his heart. "This beats only for you." - Zeta

Michael Douglas was a sex addict, you know.’ ‘Michael Douglas said eating Catherine Zeta-Jones’ pussy gave him throat cancer.

No Man's Land Let's hook up in that no man's land of Texas where a stuffed diamondback rattles in every bar, and them Tequila worms still got some wiggle left in em. We'll git tanked on Dulce Vida and Jack, go a-skinny dippin' in the Rio Grande, just 'bout where the 83 and our Land of the free bravely dead ends. I say we git drunker than ten Indians take the pickup 'cross the border to Nueva score some meth from the Los Zetas, and fuck some chikas in the ass. Jeez, it is nothing more better than being an American.

both zed and zee were used interchangeably in both British and American English, alongside a whole host of other more outlandish names for Z including izzard, shard, ezod and uzzard, all of which have long since fallen out of use. Of the two, zed is the earlier, derived at length from the name of the equivalent Greek letter zeta and first attested in written

Una dama polaca, cuyo nombre no recuerdo, aunque sería Schnizweg o Wegschinz o algo parecido con muchas zetas y uves dobles, organizó un escándalo superior cierto día en la terraza del Casino, frente a la playa. La mujer, a voz en grito, amenazó con abandonar Biarritz si no se guardaban las mínimas garantías de decoro en la indumentaria de baño. Todo fue porque unas muchachas de París, que actuaban por la noche en un hotel, estaban en la playa ensayando sus bailes... sí, cierto, un tanto subidos de tono, y en bañador une-pièce... Pero tampoco era para tanto, me parece a mí.

The Riemann hypothesis states that the roots of the zeta function (complex numbers z, at which the zeta function equals zero) lie on the line parallel to the imaginary axis and half a unit to the right of it. This is perhaps the most outstanding unproved conjecture in mathematics with numerous implications. The analyst Levinson undertook a determined calculation on his deathbed that increased the credibility of the Riemann-hypothesis. This is another example of creative work that falls within Gruber and Wallace's (2000) model.

Still, a part of me will never stop thinking of her as my sergeant. She’s the toughest, most competent, and most evenhanded soldier I’ve known, and she runs her squad as a strict meritocracy. If only a tenth of the military consisted of people like Sergeant Fallon, we would have kicked the SRA off of every inhabited celestial body between Earth and Zeta Reticuli fifty years ago already. As things stand, we’re weighed down by people like Major Unwerth, who coast through the system doing only the expected minimum. If a military is the reflection of the society it serves, it’s amazing that the Commonwealth is still at the top of the food chain on Terra. Even with all the dead wood in our ranks, we have been able to hold the line against the SRA and the dozens of regional powers in the Middle East and the Pacific Rim that are short on resources and long on grievances with their neighbors.

Corruption and defection are common in Mexico, but the Zetas elevated it to a new scale.

I park, turn off the car, and take a deep breath. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. I repeat the Litany Against Fear over and over in my mind. Forget my years at Delta Zeta, the Bene Gesserit are my true sisterhood.

Negdje oko ponoći, ovdje usred germanske zime na rubu Alpa, opet gledam,Oriona, slijepog lovca, planinskog svemirca, Posejdonova sina, najljepšeg muškarca svih vremena, zavedenog od nezasitne Eje, zore, koju je mučila nepopustljiva požuda kao kazna zbog toga što ju je Afrodita zatekla u krevetu s Aresom, bogom rata. On je najsjajnije, a ujedno i najtužnije od svih zviježđa, možda ga zato i volim. Na Hiosu se zaljubio u Meropu, Dionizovu unuku, kćer kralja Enopiona. Smio ju je oženiti pod uvjetom da potjera sve divlje zvijeri s otoka. To je priča o podloj izdaji jer nakon što je protjerao sve životinje Enopion mu je iskopao oči da ga ne bi imao za zeta. Oslijepljeni Orion odvesla se na Lemnos i tamo u Hefestovoj kovačnici nalazi na jednog naučnika koji ga na svojim leđima nosi preko pola svijeta do ruba oceana gdje se u njega zaljubljuje nezasitna Eja, a njezin brat Sunce vraća mu svjetlost u oči. Sad se želi osvetiti Enopionu, ali za svoje potrage nailazi na Artemidu koja je, kao i on, potpuno opsjednuta lovom. Zajedno odlaze u lov, ali tada se upliće Apolon i šalje na njega čudovišnog škorpiona. Oklop je te strašne životinje neuništiv. Orion bježi u more, u more svoga oca, ali što može smrtnik kad se bogovi urote protiv njega? Apolon slaže Artemidi da je plivač u moru netko drugi, muškarac koji je zaveo jednu njezinu svećenicu. Božica nacilja glavu udaljenog plivača i ubija ga, ali otplivavši do tijela vidi da je riječ o Orionu i moli Asklepija, Apolonova sina, da ga opet oživi, a kad ovaj to htjedne uraditi, Zeus ga sprečava ubivši ga munjom. Artemida potom stavlja među zvijezde Orionov uvijek prepoznatljiv lik, koga još uvijek svake noći proganja škorpion, i ja ga takvoga sada gledam na hladnome, bistrome nebeskom svodu, muškarca koji je bio prelijep da bi živio, žrtvu žena, zauvijek u lovu sa Siriusom, svojim psom, treptavom zvijezdom pod nogama. Znam kako se zovu sve njegove zvijezde, ona na ramenu je Betelgeuze, bezbroj puta sjajnija od Sunca, znam kolika je međusobna udaljenost između zvijezda na njegovu maču i na njegovu pojasu, i da će se jednom u nepojmljivim vjekovima djelovanjem svemirskih zakona toliko udaljiti da će potpuno nestati, izgubljeni lovac rastrgnut vremenom, ali time njegov čar nimalo ne slabi, lik i priča su jači, još uvijek. On je moj zaštitnik, naprepoznatljvije zviježđe, uvijek sam sretan kad ga vidim, tog smrtnika koga su božice ljubile, a bogovi mrzili.

the man was never comfortable unless he was in the company of people who were crazier than he was.

Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach—

standing tall on his own hind legs in the cockpit of a fifty-foot black cigarette boat with a silver Uzi in one hand and a magnum of smack in the other, always running ninety miles an hour with no lights and howling Old Testament gibberish at the top of his bleeding lungs.…

Wisdom should be freely available to all men without smart-alecky impediments

Ginsberg and those coffee houses with hungry-looking guitar players never did mean shit to me. They never took their drinking seriously.

Do they realize who I am? Don’t you know I can eat the God-damned hottest fucking hot sauce in the world.

shit, I’ll show these fuckers! We’ll see who can take fucking drugs. Do they realize who I am? Don’t you know I can eat the God-damned hottest fucking hot sauce in the world.

We drove it to the panhandle to listen to Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead in the first round of those Love-Ins the hippies had in the late 60’s.

The only action on the street was booze and hot cunt.

They were both good friends and heavy drinkers, a combination hard to beat.

The Riemann Hypothesis states that all the non-trivial zeroes of the zeta function are on this line. If we can prove the Riemann Hypothesis is true, then we'll also have proved the method for counting the prime numbers. In some weird twisted act of mathematical logic, at a fundamental level the alignment of these zeroes stems from the same logic as the density of the primes. It doesn't seem to make sense. But if we can understand this mysterious alignment, we understand where the numbers are hiding their primes.

In the chapter on prime numbers, I mentioned Bernhard Riemann's 1859 paper 'On the Number of Primes Less than a Given Magnitude'. In it he found a method of calculating how many primes there are below any given number. This would give mathematicians an amazing insight into the distribution and nature of prime numbers. The only problem was that he couldn't prove that this method definitely worked. He did, however, prove that if an apparent alignment in the zeta function was real, then the prime counting method was real. Then he failed to prove that too.

The zeta function is the sum of an infinite sequence of inverse powers.

To this day, the Clay Mathematics Institute's bounty of $1 million for anyone who can prove that all the non-trivial zeroes of the zeta function are on that line has gone unclaimed.

Part of Ramanujan's genius was to find a way to get values out of the zeta function for negative values. As we saw before, these sums diverge and go racing off to infinity, but Ramanujan was able to extract the bit of the answer which explodes and leave the important bit behind. Using Bernoulli numbers, he could produce values for the negative half of the zeta function-which, eventually, gives us a complete plot. This is the zeta function in graphical form.

Along with working on the Basel problem, Euler realized that adding an infinite sequence of reciprocal powers for all whole numbers will give you the same answer as multiplying together an infinite sequence of fractions which use only the prime numbers. So the zeta function can be written as two different equations, one of which relies only on the prime numbers. The one which uses all the whole numbers gives the same result as the prime fractions, but it's easier to work with. We know what all the whole numbers are, but we don't know what all the primes are. So we can substitute one for the other.

a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) program referred to as Operation Crystal Knight, or what has since been called Project Serpo, in which it is claimed that 12 astronauts left Earth in July 1965 and were taken aboard an alien spaceship to the planet Serpo in the binary star system Zeta Reticuli, as part of an exchange program.

Along the way they will be preyed upon by cartels, police, Mexican immigration authorities, maras and random rural gangs, robbed, enslaved, forced into narco assassin squads, and raped—an estimated eight out of ten migrant women who attempt to cross Mexico suffer sexual abuse along the way, sometimes at the hands of fellow migrants. Migrants are kidnapped en masse by Zetas, with the complicity of corrupted and terrorized local police and other authorities and of treacherous coyotes, so that their families back home or awaiting them in the US can be extorted; meanwhile the captives are tortured, raped and sometimes massacred. Thousands upon thousands of migrants have been murdered in Mexico, and many others die by falling from “La Bestia”; as many as seventy thousand, some experts estimate, lie buried along the “death corridor” of the migrants’ trail.

To try to make sure gunmen do hit their targets, cartels have developed training camps. The first such camps were discovered in northeast Mexico and linked to the Zetas, but they have since been found all across the country and even over the border in Guatemala. Most are built on ranches and farmlands, such as one discovered in the community of Camargo just south of the Texas border. They are equipped with shooting ranges and makeshift assault courses and have been found storing arsenals of heavy weaponry, including boxes of grenades. Arrested gangsters have described courses as lasting two months and involving the use of grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns. A training video captured by police in 2011 shows recruits running across a field, taking cover on the grass, and firing assault rifles. Sometimes training can be deadly. One recruit drowned during an exercise that required him to swim carrying his backpack and rifle. The discovery of these camps has sparked the obvious comparison to Al Qaeda training grounds in Afghanistan. But however much schooling they give, cartels still love gunslingers with real military experience. In the first decade of democracy, up until 2010, one hundred thousand soldiers had deserted from the Mexican military. There is a startling implication: country and ghetto boys sign up for the army, get the government to pay for their training, then make real money with the mob.

It is psychotic and hateful behavior. But such behaviour is typical in many war zones. Cartel thugs have gone beyond the pale because they are completely immersed in a violent conflict, living like soldiers in the trenches. Imagine the life of Zetas thugs in the war-torn northeast of Mexico, fighting daily with soldiers and rival gangs, moving from safe house to safe house, completely divorced from the reality of normal citizens. In these ghastly conditions they commit atrocities that the world finds so hard to comprehend. For many of these cartel soldiers on the front line, war and insurgency have become their central mission. While thugs have traditionally talked about fighting over drug smuggling, now many are talking about smuggling drugs to finance their war.

But the dynamics of Mexican cartels have also developed in distinct ways from Colombia. Mexico has seven major cartels—Sinaloa, Juárez, Tijuana, La Familia, Beltrán Leyva, the Gulf, and the Zetas—so it is hard to decapitate them all at once. When leaders such as Osiel Cárdenas are taken out, their organizations have only become more violent, as rival lieutenants fight to become top dog. Groups such as the Zetas and Familia have also become powerful because of their brand names rather than the reputation of their capos. Even if Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano, the Executioner, is arrested, the Zetas will likely continue as a fearsome militia. Whether the cartels will get weaker or not, everybody agrees that Mexico needs to clean up its police to move forward. Different corrupt cops firing at each other and working for rival capos is nobody’s vision of progress. Such police reform is of course easier said than done. Mexican presidents have talked about it for years, going through numerous cleanups and reorganization of forces, only to create new rotten units. A central problem is the sheer number of different agencies. Mexico has several federal law enforcement departments, thirty-one state authorities, and 2,438 municipal police forces. However, in October 2010, Calderón sent a bill to be approved by Congress that could make a real difference to the police. His controversial proposal was to absorb all Mexico’s numerous police forces into one unified authority like the Colombians have. It is a colossal reform with a huge amount of technical problems. But such a reform could be a key factor in pulling Mexico away from the brink. Even if drugs are eventually legalized, a single police force would be a better mechanism to fight other elements of organized crime, such as kidnapping. The approach has many critics. Some argue it would only streamline corruption. But even that would be a better thing for peace. At least corrupt cops could be on the same side instead of actively gunning each other down. Others argue an all-powerful force would be authoritarian. Maybe. But any such force would still be controlled by democratic government. The spiderweb of different police forces only worked because one party ran everything. In democracy, this arrangement needs reform. If a crucial cause of the breakdown in Mexico has been the fragmentation of government power, then a way forward could be to unify its police under one command. Some of the fundamental problems and core solutions lie in Mexico’s institutions.

But kidnapping is only one of the ways that the Zetas have diversified. They have also branched out into extorting bars and discos; taxing shops; taking money from prostitution rings; stealing cars; robbing crude oil and gasoline; getting money from migrant trafficking; and even pirating their own Zetas-labeled DVDs of the latest blockbuster movies. Drug-trafficking organization is no longer a sufficient term for them; they are a criminal paramilitary complex.

Poor migrants may seem an odd target for a kidnapping. Surely they have no money. That is why they risk their lives migrating. But even poor people have relatives with savings, and the Zetas can often get $2,000 from kidnapping migrants. If you multiply that by ten thousand, you get $20 million—truly kidnapping en masse.

The San Fernando massacre is a landmark in the Mexican Drug War. It surely woke up anyone who still doubted the existence of a serious armed conflict south of the Rio Grande. But for those following the mass attacks on migrants, it was a tragedy waiting to happen. San Fernando began just like all the rest of the mass kidnappings. Zetas gunmen stopped the victims at a checkpoint and abducted them, in this case from two buses. The group featured many of the usual Central Americans, but was atypical in that it also had large numbers of Brazilians and Ecuadorians. The Zetas marched the prisoners to the San Fernando ranch, which is in Tamaulipas state, just a hundred miles from the U.S. border. After a long, hard journey, the migrants were closer than ever to their destination. Then something went wrong, and the Zetas decided to murder everybody. The pure scale of death shocked the world. The seventy-two corpses were piled haphazardly around the edge of the breeze-block barn, arms and legs twisted over one another, waists and backs contorted. There were teenagers, middle-aged men, young girls, even a pregnant woman. This horror could not be ignored.

Evidence of police working for the insurgent Zetas was startling, but would soon become depressingly typical in Mexico. Time and time again, federal troops rolled into cities and accused local police of being deeply entwined with gangsters. Officers no longer just turned a blind eye on smuggling, but worked as kidnappers and assassins in their own right, a grave fragmentation of the state. To aggravate this problem, many federal officers were also found working for gangsters, normally different factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. So as federal troops rounded up Zetas, observers asked whom they were serving: the public or Sinaloan capos? These revelations underline a central problem in the Mexican Drug War. The PRI years featured a delicate dance of corruption; in the democratic years, it turned to a corrupt dance of death. In the old days, police officers were rotten, but at least they worked together. In democracy, police work for competing mafias and actively fight each other. Gangsters target both good police who get in their way and bad police who work for their rivals. For policy makers it becomes a Gordian knot. Added to this thorny issue of corruption is a more fundamental problem of drug-law enforcement. Every time you arrest one trafficker, you are helping his rival. In this way, when the federal police stormed Zetas safe houses, they were scoring victories for Sinaloans, whether they liked it or not. Arrests did not subdue violence, but only inflamed it.

It is still unclear exactly what inspired such brutality. Many point to the influence of the Guatemalan Kaibiles working in the Zetas. In the Guatemalan civil war, troops cut off heads of captured rebels in front of villagers to terrify them from joining a leftist insurgency. Turning into mercenaries in Mexico, the Kaibiles might have reprised their trusted tactic to terrify enemies of the cartel. Others point to the influence of Al Qaeda decapitation videos from the Middle East, which were shown in full on some Mexican TV channels. Some anthropologists even point to the pre-Colombian use of beheadings and the way Mayans used them to show complete domination of their enemies. The Zetas were not thinking like gangsters, but like a paramilitary group controlling territory. Their new way of fighting rapidly spread through the Mexican Drug War. In September the same year, La Familia gang—working with the Zetas in Michoacán state—rolled five human heads onto a disco dance floor. By the end of 2006, there had been dozens of decapitations. Over the next years, there were hundreds. Gangsters throughout Mexico also copied the Zetas’ paramilitary way of organizing. Sinaloans created their own cells of combatants with heavy weaponry and combat fatigues. They had to fight fire with fire. “The Beard” Beltrán Leyva led particularly well-armed death squads. One was later busted in a residential house in Mexico City. They had twenty automatic rifles, ten pistols, twelve M4 grenade launchers, and flak jackets that even had their own logo— FEDA—an acronym for Fuerzas Especiales de Arturo, or Arturo’s Special Forces.

The newer tactic of scattering bodies on city streets, as happened when Joaquín Guzmán’s goons pushed thirty-five bloody corpses (twelve of them women) off two trucks on Manuel Ávila Camacho Boulevard, near a shopping mall in the prettier part of the port city of Veracruz one day in September 2011, to terrorize their adversaries... Guzmán, known as El Chapo (Shorty) for his small stature, ran the largest airborne opera- tion in Mexico; he owned more aircraft than Aeromexico, the national air- line. Between 2006 and 2015, Mexican authorities seized 599 aircraft — 586 planes and 13 helicopters—from the Sinaloa cartel; by comparison, Aeromexico had a piddling fleet of 127 planes.... One Zeta atrocity I knew nothing about took place in 2010, in the small town of San Fernando, south of Reynosa. A roaming band of Zetas stopped two buses of migrants—men, women, and children from Central and South America, who were fleeing the violence in their countries. The Zetas demanded money. The migrants had no money. The Zetas demanded that the migrants work for them, as assassins or operatives or drug mules. The migrants refused. So they were taken to a building in the village of El Huizachal, blindfolded, their hands and legs bound, and each one was shot in the head. Seventy-two of them died. One man (from Ecuador) played dead, escaped, and raised the alarm... The gory details of this massacre became known when one of the perpetrators was arrested, Édgar Huerta Montiel, an army deserter known as El Wache, or Fat Ass. He admitted killing eleven of the migrants person- ally, in the belief (so he said) that they were working for a gang hostile to his own. A year later, near the same town, police found 47 mass graves containing 193 corpses — mostly migrants or passengers in buses hijacked and robbed while passing through this area of Tamaulipas state, about eighty miles south of the US border... But in the early 2000s headless bodies began to appear, tossed by the roadside, while human heads were displayed in public, at intersections, and randomly on the roofs of cars. This butchery was believed to be inspired by a tactic of the Guatemalan military’s elite commandos, known as Kaibiles. A man I was to meet in Matamoros, on my traverse of the border, explained how the Kaibiles were toughened by their officers. The officers encouraged recruits to raise a dog from a puppy, then, at a certain point in their training, the recruit was ordered to kill the dog and eat it.... When the Kaibiles became mercenaries in the Mexican cartels, the first beheadings occurred, the earliest known taking place in 2006: a gang in Michoacán kicked open the doors of a bar and tossed five human heads on the dance floor. Decapitations are now, according to one authority on the business, “a staple in the lexicon of violence” for Mexican cartels....

Instead of hiding bodies in mass graves, corpses were triumphantly displayed, as when the Jalisco New Generation (while still part of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel) dumped the thirty-five bodies on an avenue in Veracruz in September 2011. In reply, the Zetas scattered twenty-six corpses in Jalisco and a dozen in Sinaloa. On closer inspection, the bodies were those of ordinary citizens, not criminals: they were workers and students who had been abducted and murdered and displayed in order to strike fear in the heart of anyone who doubted the murderous resolve of the Zetas... In To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, John Gibler writes about a related series of bizarre and violent episodes that took place in Torreón, in Coahuila state, bordering Texas: “Who would believe, for example, that the warden of a state prison would let convicted killers out at night and loan them official vehicles, automatic assault rifles, and bulletproof vests, so that they could gun down scores of innocent people in a neighboring state and then quickly hop back over the state line and into prison, behind bars, a perfect alibi. Who would believe that a paramilitary drug-trafficking organization formed by ex−Special Forces of the Mexican Army would kidnap a local cop and torture him into confessing all of the above details about the prisoners’ death squad, videotape the confession, execute the cop on camera with a shot to the heart, and then post the video on YouTube? Who could fathom that the federal attorney general would, within hours of the video-taped confession and execution being posted online, arrest the warden, and then a few days later hold a press conference fully acknowledging that the prisoners’ death squad had operated for months, killing ten people in a bar in January 2010, eight people in a bar in May 2010, and seventeen people at a birthday party in July?” Yet all of this actually happened. During April 2012, when El Chapo was at war with the Zetas, fourteen torsos — armless and legless bodies — were found in a car by the side of the road in Nuevo Laredo. Dead Zetas. Some of the torsos were in the trunk, for which there is a specific narco term: encajuelado (“trunked”; therefore, trunks trunked). Soon after, in Michoacán state, the Zetas met their match in the person of Nazario Moreno (called El Más Loco, the Craziest One), leader of the ruthless Templarios, the Knights Templar cartel, whose recruits were required to eat human flesh—their victims’— as part of their initiation rites. When Moreno was gunned down by the Mexican army in 2014, the Zetas flourished, and remain dominant. But there was a posthumous bonus for the Craziest One: he was promoted to sainthood. In and around his birthplace in Apatzingán, shrines and altars were erected to Saint Nazario, the dead capo represented as a holy figure in robes, venerated by credulous Michoacanos.

The film version of Chicago is a milestone in the still-being-written history of film musicals. It resurrected the genre, winning the Oscar for Best Picture, but its long-term impact remains unclear. Rob Marshall, who achieved such success as the co-director of the 1998 stage revival of Cabaret, began his career as a choreographer, and hence was well suited to direct as well as choreograph the dance-focused Chicago film. The screen version is indeed filled with dancing (in a style reminiscent of original choreographer Bob Fosse, with plenty of modern touches) and retains much of the music and the book of the stage version. But Marshall made several bold moves. First, he cast three movie stars – Catherine Zeta-Jones (former vaudeville star turned murderess Velma Kelly), Renée Zellweger (fame-hungry Roxie Hart), and Richard Gere (celebrity lawyer Billy Flynn) – rather than Broadway veterans. Of these, only Zeta-Jones had training as a singer and dancer. Zellweger’s character did not need to be an expert singer or dancer, she simply needed to want to be, and Zellweger’s own Hollywood persona of vulnerability and stardom blended in many critics’ minds with that of Roxie.8 Since the show is about celebrity, casting three Hollywood icons seemed appropriate, even if the show’s cynical tone and violent plotlines do not shed the best light on how stars achieve fame. Marshall’s boldest move, though, was in his conception of the film itself. Virtually every song in the film – with the exception of Amos’s ‘Mr Cellophane’ and a few on-stage numbers like Velma’s ‘All That Jazz’ – takes place inside Roxie’s mind. The heroine escapes from her grim reality by envisioning entire production numbers in her head. Some film critics and theatre scholars found this to be a cheap trick, a cop-out by a director afraid to let his characters burst into song during the course of their normal lives, but other critics – and movie-goers – embraced this technique as one that made the musical palatable for modern audiences not accustomed to musicals. Marshall also chose a rapid-cut editing style, filled with close-ups that never allow the viewer to see a group of dancers from a distance, nor often even an entire dancer’s body. Arms curve, legs extend, but only a few numbers such as ‘Razzle Dazzle’ and ‘Cell Block Tango’ are treated like fully staged group numbers that one can take in as a whole.

Trust me. The dead don't shed any tears.

All around us, insurance companies with patriotic names are housed in gigantic towers of white plaster. Here prestigious law firms perform their business for rich people who live next to jaded movie stars

We were at the home base of the holy man who encouraged presidents to drop bombs on poor Cockroaches in far-off villages in Vietnam

All through schools, jobs, and bumming, I haven’t even held the hand of a Mexican woman, excepting whores who are all the same anyhow

…my new name, Buffalo Zeta Brown. General Zeta was the hero of an old movie classic…A combination of Zapata and Villa and Maria Felix as the femme fatale

The broads are fantastic…the bulging breasts of these savage wenches who move with graceful twists. Since I have come to L.A. I have not touched a woman of my own culture. I swallow my milk and feel my pants bursting with heat

Seven fine broads are at his side. They sing songs of the Mexican Revolution which they learned from their grandmothers

Here a young girl in high heels wears a bikini, a blue bikini, with blonde hair. Standing next to her is a girl as young as Rosalie, in a mini-skirt and a strap over her little red nipples

It seemed that twenty-five thousand Chicanos had marched down Whittier Boulevard. But what had started as a protest against the burning of peasants in Vietnam turned into a massive public declaration by fire of their own existence

They were either all unconscious, or they were smart enough to lie down and play dead.

My point is that I'm sick to death of all the pretension, of insisting that the abstract science we call mathematics is more vital than anything else, because if God forbid someone doesn't memorize the zeta function for his girlfriend, he's some straw-munching rube.

The Concert,” Zeta says. “Painted by Johannes Vermeer around 1660, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990, along with twelve other pieces of art. The Concert alone is valued at two hundred million dollars.” My mouth drops open. “The total value of all art stolen that night is about five hundred million. None of the stolen works has been recovered.

Para nosotros –dice el normalista– votar por el PRI es votar por los Guerreros Unidos, por el PRD significa votar por Los Rojos, por el PAN es votar por Los Caballeros Templarios, Los Zetas, El Cártel del Golfo. Para nosotros son sinónimos…

Vivimos bajo el imperio de la cifra: nunca los números tuvieron tanto peso en nuestra visión del mundo. Todo parece mensurable; instituciones, gobiernos, universidades, empresas gastan fortunas en computar las variables más recónditas y las más visibles: poblaciones, enfermedades, producciones, mercados, audiencias, geografías, miserias, perspectivas. Todo tiene un número. Es difíci, es nuevo: los Estados y los patrones llevan siglos intentando censar cuanto más mejor; recién ahora tienen herramientas para hacerlo a su gusto. Y lo hacen: para saber cómo somos, hay que medir; para saber qué sirve y qué no sirve, hay que medir; para saber qué hacer, medir; para saber si lo hecho estuvo bien o mal, medir medir medir. Nunca el mundo estuvo tan medido, comedido. Durante siglos, alguien atento podía notar que los chicos indios eran muy flacos y comían muy poco; ahora puede leer en los informes más detallados que el 47,2 sufre de bajo peso —y suponer que entendió lo que pasaba. La apariencia de mensurabilidad hace que creíamos que tenemos todos los datos necesarios. Los números dan apariencia de solidez a cualquier iniciativa, a cualquier política, a cualquier negocio, a cualquier protesta. Pero son, antes que nada, una herencia torcida, el reflejo de ese universo donde los decisivo es si la empresa ganó 34.480.415 o 34.480.475. Una adaptación de la mirada a esa mirada. Los números son el idioma en que creemos que nos entendemos —pretendemos que nos entendemos, tratamos de entendernos. Este libro también está lleno de números —y me avergüenza levemente, cómo me avergüenza pronunciar la ce y la zeta cuando estoy en España: hablar en un idioma que no es del todo mío para creer que me aseguro que me entiendan.