Kees' photos with the keyword: Baarn

A Roman Catholic church in my home town, neo-Gothic, pretty big. In its design too grand, in fact, to enable completing the bell tower. Most failed Dutch church towers have managed to rise a bit higher. I have once imagined I was a billionaire offering to finish this one after the original plans. I think it would have caused civil commotion: for one thing, bells ringing wouldn’t have allowed the neighbors to sleep late.

This is ugly. I'll be glad when the house is sold.

From the inside, it is even uglier. No need for curtains anymore...

If you’re conditioned to find faces you encounter them everywhere.

For increased stability, the regular Dutch traffic sign has an open rim at its back, which is a convenient cradle for fire-crackers. Small fire-crackers can well use a sound board, don’t they? –and the big ones ... well, their effect is just amazing! To the approximately $100,000,000 the Dutch people spent on pyrotechnics, last New Year’s Eve, should be added the costs of (public and private) property destroyed.

...they’re gonna walk all over you. Perhaps there’s some fancy Eastern philosophy behind all this, but I can only relate it to a major work of the American philosopher Lee Hazlewood.

New Year’s Eve, the afternoon progressing. Most shops are closing now. The last customers who still need the traditional fritters ( oliebollen and appelflappen ) are being served. Then everybody will go home, and spend a long evening with family and friends.

The Dutch people have spent an estimated €60,000,000 ($100,000,000) on fire-crackers and other pyrotechnics this year. Also there are left-overs from the previous year. Too much to burn on New Year’s Eve, so they have to start early... It is hard to find tranquility between Christmas and the New Year. The cemetery of my home town is not exactly a fun place to be, but far better than the rest, if you ask me.

Death is as absurd as life. We all know (though we may not like to be reminded of it): we’re born inter faeces et urinam.... –but have we really struggled all of our lives to improve upon that condition only to return to it when we lie dead and buried? In a restaurant you would ask for a better table.

Wouldn’t this KillerBee scooter, photographed in my hometown Baarn, be the right thing for QueenBees? It looks sharp enough...