New York Nairobi Vienna ^{[Nairobi #1 #2 #3]}
On Ambitions And Their Strings Attached

Satisfying intellectual ambitions is up and far above anything else in quality/price ratio. It is cheap, and has no strings attached such as other ambitions, like: enemies (in case you cherish a political career), worries (when you want to get rich or have children), hangovers, korsakoff (the drunkard's strings). As everybody knows, smoking causes impotence, ruins your heart, harms your children, even the unborn, kills you even more quickly than government licensed Nairobi traffic, and, worst of all, transfers millions for no return to those government pocket fillers warning you so earnestly for all these disasters (a pack of cigarettes really costs a few dollar cents only). And yes, even a totally stupid game as golf, though much better than what's on the previous list, is way down learning and reading. Not only the expenses are in an entirely different class. There are also the requirements of mind boggling social intercourse.

Photos left: sub-prime trade floor hangovers, middle: Napoleon overplayed his hand, right: the world's Santa Claus image, copyright Coca Cola. Just list with smoking and doping, and well above these two items: listening to other people, having those nice friends, watching TV and video, popular music, games, celebrating Christmas, financial speculation, top sport, war, politics and all the rest.

Well more than a year ago, while Africa heard about the start of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and all the boring d�ja-vus accompanying rich people cheating each other,  like headaches, stress, heart attacks, lapses into alcohol and cigarettes, flying for arrest and suicide, I downloaded, free, a host of literature about the period of French revolution and after (1789-1815) ^{[see greetings page "Headwind"]}. While scraping together my French, I saw the star of Napoleon suddenly rise after 10 years of French revolution chaos. I saw him simply end (!) that revolution ("La r�volution est achev�e"), conquer Italy, organize France and set for a total domination of Western Europe. I saw him getting pathologically over-ambitious as a result of feeling despised by the established European feudal elite and especially the English (Napoleon had the habit, for him a bad one, to read English newspapers every day and in them found himself ridiculed, caricaturized and called a "Cromwell"), being prompted by his will to subordinate everybody to grossly overplay his hand, ending up, after roughly 15 years in charge and having reached Cairo, Lisbon, Copenhagen and Moscow, with a territorial France smaller than the one he started with. Now, he even has lost Paris, has abdicated and got banned to the Italian island of Elba ....

Napoleon-ridicule in the British press did not exactly stop after he lost even his own Paris...

.... while I am together with the men he so resented for despising him, in Vienna. They meet to restore the territories of Europe according to the pre-Napoleonic order. We are in October 1814. These people here in Vienna are in no better state than our modern trading floor coke-and-champaign elite fools, they are ready, by purpose or accident, but anyhow by ambition, greed and rivalry, to bring total disaster to each other, and while they are preparing for that in Vienna any one of the kings, emperors, other top negotiators and their staff each have an invitation for a nice party somewhere in town every night, where they have the opportunity to go after each others wives. The dresses are gorgeous, and Vienna has become centre, both in music and movement, of a recently developed "riotous and indecent" dance, the waltz. The Vienna congress itself has been postponed a few weeks for noble reasons but really because the main four powers want to informally agree before it opens. Italy does not exist, neither does Germany. They are patchworks "owned" by rivaling small princes. The big four are England, Russia, Austria (not as rich but much bigger than Great Britain, reaching from the Mediterranean to deep in Slavic territory) and Prussia, now forming the NorthEastern quarter of Germany, after it had, by Napoleon, first totally been moved (I am serious!), then reshaped, then crushed.  I myself do not shun the parties, but I do not drink too much, and try to keep track of how some big men informally talk to each other, most notably Russian emperor Alexander, British minister Castlereagh, minister Metternich of Austria, and Talleyrand, French minister of foreign affairs, who entered in that service 20 years ago, right after some shady Paris parvenu-intriguers killed the terrible Robespierre in 1794 and who had remained in that service almost ever since, surviving at least four more coups, then managing to remain at his post even now, after Napoleon's fall six months ago and the old Bourbon royal family reassumed their kingship of France! The internet has the Vienna conference's chief line-up complete:

Vienna conference's chief line-up ^{[version with names]}

Meanwhile Anne ^{[previous: Nairobi #3]} had her car, a very old one  - and by way of ultimate calamity a Landrover - for a four-days heavy reconditioning in a garage. We're now four weeks, Anne is calling or visiting the garage every day. The shit has now been reassembled to again form a car but refuses to run; or so is told. "Technicians" (that's how they call themselves) suspect the fuel pump, which was brand new when the brilliantly chosen vehicle came onto their oily mud hole. One of my French historians, the later French president Adolphe Thiers, writes that Talleyrand did wrong at Vienna by revealing his king's real wishes (the chase of Napoleon's crony Murat from the throne of Naples, revocation of article of surrender treaty of Paris which gave Parma to Napoleon's wife, daughter of Austrian King, Marie Louise, and no annexation of Saxony by Prussia). According to Thiers, Talleyrand should have kept quiet until others with the same desires would come to him. Instead of buying loyalty, he would have been able to sell it! Accordingly, I told Anne she should stay away from that garage en not call them. In case of no repair the value of the car would fall below the garage bill, she could simply stay away there for ever and buy a new (Japanese!!!) car through a better garage. Now indeed, the garage calls HER, yes, DAILY and claims the car is ready for the road. No more brand new fuel pump problems...Thiers tested positive.
But Anne is not easily to be kept away from her phone. She just bought the former Nairobi embassy residence ^{[see previous greeting]} of Austria, the tiny remains of what in my "congress"-Vienna days was the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, from the widow of the former Austrian ambassador now living in Vienna, opposite that very opera house so eagerly frequented by my Vienna congress diplomats. At purchase the embassy residence was in quite good, surely un-African shape, but Anne had some forty-odd finishing jobs, or as she calls them: "projects". Phoning now is to get the repairmen on their places and calling them back after their usual unsatisfactory performance. She is not shy of involving holiday guests like me, and so I was seduced to check her "project" list, and her tool box. The list was too large, the box totally inadequate. Anne, used to solve problems by buying commodities or hiring services, thought the purchase of tools a totally frivolous waste of money. After great rhetoric efforts I managed to make her buy some essentials, but failed to get the saw and the drill bits through. For the purchase of those, however she went, a woman converted by miracles of hanging paintings, repairing lights, water pumps and chairs, back to the shop herself. By the way, she has a resident boy friend, but he is a Kenyan and specialized in relaxed posing as an artist.
Even before all projects could have ended in an uncomfortable void of phone calls, Anne went for organizing a boxing day party. Some 30 people were planned to be put to games (swimming, garden golf chipping, pool), food and drinks. I decided not to apply as the games director. After all, my present passions are smoking good Havana cigars, drinking, eating, reading about the Vienna conference and, OK, golf, but playing it, not bullying players into a format. Nevertheless I was gratefully accepted for the gratifying job. I resigned (to the appointment), designed an invitation, found a big sun-umbrella to put upside down and be the target to chip in, invented "stroke pool billiard", with a queue ball and six balls to pot, 1-5 strokes birdie, 6 par, 7-12 bogey, 13-18 turkey, 18-24 chicken, 25-36 dead chicken, 37 strokes: game over. Swimming would require bringing 5 golf balls one by one to the start side from the opposite side. Registration (directly in Microsoft Excel) until 14:00, so as to have all Kikuyu in before eight.

Guests brought excellent food, our friend Mike even used Anne's oven to serve a stuffed turkey. The number of swimming subscriptions was substandard and moreover initial subscribers Anne and Lucy retired because of "cold" (air was surely above 25^oC, and the floating swimming pool thermometer pointed 30^oC, which proved, according to the ladies, its defectiveness). Nevertheless I got a 3 kid first heat, and a second heat in which to my surprise I got thoroughly beaten by a thin freckled Dutchman.
By way of experiment I asked for people's tribe at registration. Many adults were skeptical and said "Kenyan!" or something like it. Children, however, had no problems at all: KIKUYU!!! Then there were two totally charming six year olds who told that for sure they were "Muslim", so after a weak retry I was happy to register them as such. A fat Kikuyu with a near single digit handicap chipped 4 of 30 in the sun umbrella. He was wondering why, I helped him out pointing at the fact that Kikuyu have problems performing under pressure, vid. the smoky presidential elections of 2007. This closed every window for jokes: "we clearly won those elections! Everybody is confirming that! These counterclaims are totally forged and baseless!". After quickly and silently writing his deplorable score I swiftly retired. The whole game party was a total success, and I would not be surprised if it would get repeated.
One of Anne's attractions is her espresso machine with cappuccino milk foam maker. In congress Vienna 1814 that thrill is even greater because, though they had copied coffee drinking from the Turks a long time before, adding milk foam to coffee is a more recent new attraction. The croissant also is a Viennese invention. Pastry was first made in de Turkish crescent shape to celebrate the liberation of Vienna from the Turkish siege by a Polish (!) army in 1685. Even now during the congress, Vienna is almost at the border to Turkey: Croatia was Austrian, but starting from Bosnia SouthEastward everything is Turkish.
But no games in Vienna, apart from the occasional trick-track. The society drinks and dances in waiting for the big shots to be ready to go into the official format of the conference. Not one swimming pool in Vienna. Few can swim but all ride horses. Daily I hear of international society marriages agreed upon. The Vienna shops have business days to remember for a long time. All hotels and lodgings are full for the best of prices. Yet, some headaches are ahead and this year father Christmas, though over a month late, comes ... from Elba. February 26 it will be 195 years ago. We'll keep you posted.

Bert tells more about the French revolution, consulate and empire: click on the pictures):

Bert tells about other reading: Go to: Bert Tells What He Reads