Some Photos (20250315)
[♥ MOSTLY OF MASCOTS (っ◔◡◔)っ ♥]
Meeting Garlic Dracula

During a recent meander around Tsuen Wan, I snapped some photos. One of the first things that caught my eye was a poster informing the public that two new classes of appliance, dehumidifiers and tumble-style clothes dryers, have been added to the list of REE covered by the WEEE scheme. Imperfect summary: Appliance-makers and retailers pay the Hong Kong government a fee (a levy in local legal parlance) for each device sold in HK that is somehow related to their eventual disposal and consumers can ask sellers to arrange for same-day removal of an old appliance as part of the purchase of a new one.

The weirdly carrot-like mascot on the poster is Big Waster (). Big Waster was introduced back in 2013 for a campaign aimed at getting diners to make more of an effort to avoid purchasing food they weren’t ultimately going to consume and its oversized peepers are intended as an allusion to its eyes being bigger than his stomach. Since then, it has become the overall ambassador character for the HK government’s Environment and Ecology Bureau. Unbeknownst to me (until I found the mascot bios page on the Hong Kong Waste Reduction Website, the orange feller was joined by a recycling-specific colleague in 2020: ghost-like, mildew-colored, and cyclopean Greeny (). To date, I haven’t seen Greeny in the wild but will certainly keep my eyes peeled now that I know of its existence.

Our rambles that day took us to Discovery Park, a mall-with-apartment-blocks-on-top that has since been rebranded as D-Park. Eslite, a Taiwanese bookstore chain, has a small location on the ground floor of the mall selling more and more random stuff and fewer and fewer books as time goes on. This decorative panel made from what I’d guess to be adhesive-backed black vinyl on a reflective plastic sheet features a portrait of Franz Kafka, his name in Chinese along with his birth and death years, and a short quote. Kafka wrote in German. What I’ve read of his oeuvre has been in English translation. Anyway, here’s a longer Kafka quote in English with the bit posted in the bookstore in bold:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

The term Kafkaesque is sometimes misused as a synonym for another eponymous adjective, Orwellian, but the two words, though both describe certain aspects of the little guy’s relationship with certain kinds of (government) bureaucracy, possess very different meanings. If you look closely at the above image, you might notice a pinkish glow washing out the wood paneling and topmost bit of matte black in the Kafka display. That’s from infrared light emitted by an LED (or LEDs) inside a blister-case surveillance camera, also visible in the photo, mounted on the ceiling of the store. The surveillance camera isn’t Kafkaesque and, given that it’s likely privately owned and not necessarily tied into a municipal/law-enforcement system, not even Orwellian.

A stone’s throw from the Eslite was a shop (a TOCA LOCA [TOCA LOCA (HK)], it seems) selling plastic figurines for adults. One of the displays inside was laden with PVC figures of Garfield and other notable characters from the Garfield comic strip media empire with what appeared to be glass crack pipes in their mouths.

A taped-on price-discount sign sign reads I AM NOT SLEEPING and searching online for Garfield and that phrase yielded some illuminating results, including a listing for one of the toys on the website of local high-end department store Lane Crawford that identifies the line as products of a local toy designer called ZCWO and includes the following explanatory text:

Featuring the beloved comic character Garfield from the world’s most widely syndicated comic strip, ZCWO presents this I Am Not Sleeping figurine to elevate your interior. Dressed in a taupe-hued pyjama set with a yawn slogan signed on the front, this piece captures Garfield’s playfulness with the drooling and bubble-blowing.

The things that look like crack pipes are supposed to be bubbles of drool. Alright. Sure.

There were also some interesting-looking posters hanging in display cases on a wall outside the shop. They featured two cartoon characters, apparently from a line called Fools Garden (a subsidiary of Fools Paradise, naturally) named Garlic Dracula and Pumpkin Miku:

They’re chibi-style characters with, respectively, a garlic bulb for a head and the shell of a pumpkin pressed onto their head.

A large area on the mall’s ground-floor indoor concourse was being used for various youth activities related to a Science in the Mall event taking place on March 15th and 16th, including a sort of generative-AI-powered photo booth attraction. I snapped a clear pic of the foamboard explaining the workflow:

A closeup view of the before-and-after images given as examples:

In the Discovery Park aka D-Park supermarket, we spotted our final mascots/characters of the afternoon:

The store was a ParknShop outlet (no corporate relationship to the owners or management of D-Park) and the snowsuited guy and ice cube are versions of ParknShop’s egg-themed mascots: Best Guy and Easy (). Best Guy is a large anthropomorphized egg with arms and legs and Easy is a smaller fried egg that looks more sunny side up than over easy. They’re wincing from the cold or something in this illustration but, canonically, both of them have pairs of capital-letter-Ps for eyes.