Allow me to express my disappointment
That not only does "มาลัย" apparently translate as "garland", but a bit of unsafe image searching didn't turn up anything even remotely resembling an alarming thai idiom. Just picture of flowers.
"In the Soviet suburbs of Hell and the blasted avenues of Mogadishu, I saw what our society could become" - Peter Hitchens, The Daily Mail The Bongster is summoned to a crisis meeting at No.10. Britain's skills shortage is top of the agenda. I enter the room, but I haven't even had time to place the large crate of one-litre …
I was reading the main article chuckling and snortling softly to myself, as you do. It's safe to laugh, because there's no way it could be mistaken for reality. I clicked the link to Ben Hammersley and the laughter continued; what a sense of humour! The man has a talent for encapsulating in parody everything that ¡Bong! symbolises! The pair of them could be brothers!!
Then as I read further into the Hammersley Chronicles, I started to feel a slight feeling of unease. Creeping, intangible, and yet in some way very very real. Then it dawned. For Hammersley, this isn't parody. It's real. The WSJ article was written in deadly earnest.
Slowly but surely, the laughter died.