Did what there, Stanley? Is there a French word for "it"?

1: If you don't know, you can't afford it, I'm told.

Everywhere you do it, people did it there.

Trust the Dutchman to cut to the chase, reminding us that the whole world is one big afwerkplek.

Everywhere you do it go, people did it there.

Sorry, Stanley.

5: My illusions are destroyed.

6: just as well; they reeked of stranger-fluid.

Many of those are really frightening. I was amused, though, by the one lone minimalist/modernist room. It seemed like a relief.

I like the poster of the woman, where at the bottom in big letters it says S E X. Before adding the caption, the designer test ran the poster, and the buyers were like "This poster makes me want to do something, but I can't put my finger on it. Drive a fast car? That must be it."

The fifth from the top freaked me out at first because I mistook the easy chair by the side of the bed for a little kid's bed.

I got a nasty intrusive bandwidth hogging popup from the first link. beware.

ew, people did it there

And yet you showed up for the second UnfoggeDCon.

The second and third ones from the bottom aren't too bad.

"ew, people did it there"

I guess it's good for a budding rockstar to hate hotels - saves lots of money on tour.

Yeah, nobody "did it" on your opening act's kitchen floor.

I'm very amused by the one that looks like a small dorm room (3rd from the end). "My fantasy is generic, dull sex."

Actually, what I love about that room is the wooden ceiling. One of the best parts of Austria (and I assume parts of Germany) is that a typical ceiling finish is wood - not drywall or plaster, or pressboard, but honest-to-god wood. And that little room has a wood ceiling accented with... wood! A carpenter's delight.

Also amusing: the one with the oversize headboard ornamented with leather gear, including a big strap-on. Wall Art in 3D!

That first photo made me starting singing "Komm in meinen Wigwam." Nothing like a little Heino in the morning!

And no you pervs, it doesn't mean that. Then it would need the dative, "Komm in meinem Wigwam."

Oh, and I just noticed: in the penultimate picture, the one that looks like a veryfairly tasteful hotel room (with shower by the bed - yay, hygiene!), the picture above the bed appears to be a high school-grade sketch of an anatomically unlikely woman. Classy!

Is "Wigwam" the same gender as "Tipi"?

15: Wood ceilings do sound nice. Maybe we should add that to our little list of fantasy improvements to make to the house. We do have to replace at least part of the kitchen ceiling.

Leo says it's das Tipi. And Wigwam, we know from the title of the song, is der Wigwam. And talking about that room, we could call it der Wigwam-Puff or der Tipi-Puff.

(Just wanted to use that word Puff. For some reason I find it hilarious.)

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Annals of great headlines:

Thai King Fails to Deliver Speech

"I feel like I was supposed to do something today, I just can't think what it was...."

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We do have to replace at least part of the kitchen ceiling.

Probably not the best room for it, unless you go with tight joints and a high gloss finish.

But yeah, it's gorgeous - sometimes simple planking, sometimes more ornate, but always so nice.

My Berlin apartment has white-painted wood ceilings in the entryway and the bathroom. The one in the entryway is dropped quite a bit lower than the rest of the apartment's ceilings and there's storage in that space. So handy.

The one in the bathroom gives it a sauna/scandinavian feel.

God, these all seem so mood-killingly impersonal.

God, these all seem so mood-killingly impersonal.

There's nothing worse than when your impersonal surroundings intrude on your commercial sex.

I've always kind of wondered why the Japanese love-hotel thing never took off in New York. There are enough twenty-somethings in minimal privacy roommate situations that you'd think it would be a real market. Maybe it's squeamishness about catering to commercial sex, which you wouldn't be able to exclude.

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Yet for all the safety of his position the anonymous commenter also suffers in his own way--from anonymity. He is like the B-movie invisible man who can frighten, harass, and spy on the visible person but never be seen and recognized himself. The pain of anonymity supplies a possible explanatio for the violence of the anonymous commentariat's rage against especially that category of person--the celebrity--who can suffer every mortal pain (injury, addition, divorce, death, even bankruptcy) except for that of facelessness.
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27: I dunno... Love hotels just seem... Weird. Like really really weird. As in, one of the things that can be used as exhibit A for most young Americans in "This is why Japan is a bizarre place, no matter how ultra modern and full of cool robots." It never fails to elicit the "Really? And that's just what they use? Pretty much all the time? But what about staying the night?" response, even from me after multiple friends have explained the concept.

I suppose it's something to do with how it seems to so forthrightly admit that there's an alienation at the heart of one-night-stands. I prefer to think that there's a temporary bond, that two nice people can treat each other like friends for at least a pleasant night and a breakfast in addition to intermingling their anatomy.

Also, hotel rooms are kinda squicky. There's something so artificial about them because no one actually lives in the space, but the small attempts at hominess create an uncanny valley of liveability that I'd liken to a human habitat that aliens would build for their zoo. I'd rather screw on something utterly upfront about its artificiality and inhospitality, like astroturf (though with a blanket, because that stuff is murder on bare skin).

You're saying rather screw on astroturf (with a blanket) than in a hotel room?

I've never gone to a kraut bordello, and hope to never go there. But as a straight and prudish fellow, I'd sooner go than blow there.
Sorry.
What is going on with #3? "Sure, I'd like to fuck, but could we do it someplace that reminds me of my grandmother?"

Also, hotel rooms are kinda squicky. There's something so artificial about them because no one actually lives in the space, but the small attempts at hominess create an uncanny valley of liveability that I'd liken to a human habitat that aliens would build for their zoo.

I agree with this analysis, except that... hotel sex with your SO is teh hott.

How to explain?

30: I'm young, my knees are still in good shape.

rather screw on astroturf

On the 50 yard line. With cheerleaders and tens of thousands of screaming fans.

I prefer to think that there's a temporary bond, that two nice people can treat each other like friends for at least a pleasant night and a breakfast in addition to intermingling their anatomy.

I can see that -- but doesn't the population that really doesn't have comfortable privacy in their dwelling place not have the option of a pleasant night and a breakfast? And there's a fair amount of that among young NY adults.

You're saying rather screw on astroturf (with a blanket) than in a hotel room?

Holy shit, Po-Mo is really Anna Benson!

35: Do people in NYC not even get their own bedrooms? I'm curious now. Even in the most crowded Chicago arrangements I've seen, there's been some private space. Plus, roommates are often out of the picture anyway, whether they work early so they're asleep, or work late so they're still out, or crashing at their significant other's, etc.

As for meeting roomies in the morning, I guess that all depends on the roommate relationship. It would be a lot harder if you're living with relative strangers to have a comfortable breakfast, but it can be kind of fun with a house/apartment of friends.

Holy shit, Po-Mo is really Anna Benson Bill Clinton.

Eh, I know a bunch of people where, e.g., someone is sleeping in what would have been the living room of a one-bedroom apartment, although not people who literally share bedrooms, and lots of people who are sharing tight quarters with people they aren't socially close to at all. If you've got your own room that no one else is likely to need to walk through unexpectedly, and you're friends with your roommates, the comfort/privacy issues aren't acute. But that's not everyone.

We have "Low Daytime Rates" hotels in Portland. A faculty secretary booked a visiting lecturer in one of them by mistake once.

In other news, my sister's sociopath ex is Portuguese American, and she kept his name, so we just got some junk mail offering Portuguese-language cable.

Comment.

The idea here is that the rooms are for different kinds of sex, right? Like, the one with all the leathery stuff is for bondage, and the lacy traditional ones are for the elderly, and the small dormy one third from the bottom is for discount sex, and the second one with the fridge is for people who want to drink a coke after they fuck.

And subtly understated, elegant sex is across the street somewhere. The site doesn't make German clients look very classy.

When I was in local politics, a developer came to talk to us, casting about for a location to develop a boutique hotel. We suggested an old commercial building that had been vacant for some time.

He said, "I looked at that, but if I did it, I'd want to include the old motel next to it. When I went to talk to that guy, he said he wasn't interested in selling. He said, 'I've got 40 rooms here, and I sell 150 rooms a day. I'm doing all right.'"

The thing that bothers me about Love Hotels is the knowledge that pretty much everything in the damn room has had some sort of bodily fluid on it. You can go hog wild with the Formula 409 all you want, but the essence of jizz remains. Lurking.

On another level I love the idea, and I'd be intrigued at the possibility of taking an SO to a place where we could fuck in the hot tub, f'rex. But sitting there in the actual hot tub pickled in homeopathic spooge I think I'd have a hardsoft time.

The thing that bothers me about Love Hotels is the knowledge that pretty much everything in the damn room has had some sort of bodily fluid on it.

That's also true of pretty much every hotel room. Sorry.

oudemia has a funny story about the "naked butt blankets" in hotels. Molly and I still refer to the top cover of a hotel bed as the "naked butt blanket."

People often comment how working in a restaurant or two gives you a completely different view of the front end service.

Same goes for hotels, really.

45: It's funny -- issues like this are more the norm than otherwise, and I'm as easily grossed out as anyone by something perceptibly soiled, but this doesn't bother me at all. If whatever it is has been washed, and I can't tell it's dirty, and there's no real risk I'm going to catch anything contagious, I am entirely unfazed by the idea that there were strangers' bodily fluids all over a hotel bed before I got there.

unfazed by the idea that there were strangers' bodily fluids

For some reason I can't quite pin down, I'd be more disturbed to know it was bodily fluids from people I know.

49: That, and people generally have poor intuition about what is `dirty' if they can't see it. In a typical house, the kitchen sink is far nastier than anything int the bathrooms.

51: Which is why I drink out of the toilet.

51: I have repeatedly read that, and really don't buy it. Part of what's going on is that 'nastier' in these comparisons, IIRC, is measured in bacterial count on a given surface. But most bacteria aren't actually going to do you any harm. People are disgusted by shit, specifically, largely because there are particular pathogens likely to be found in shit that will make you sick. So, there's genuinely good reason to worry more about shit-related contamination than about bacteria growing on a surface that got food on it.

This is a snap reaction, and possibly if I understood the microbiology of it all better, I wouldn't feel this way. Nonetheless, I do.

Which is why I drink out of the toilet.

WOOF WOOF BOW WOW OWOO*

*(Stereotype depracated, speciesist!)

Well, set aside notions of grossness based upon how often relative strangers are spooging and squelching in the love hotel rooms, just think of environmental impact relative to good-old-fashioned home-based sex.

Standard hotels are already pretty bad given the daily sheet and towel washing, using industrial washer/dryers and fairly harsh cleansers. Now imagine that going on for all the sheets in the love hotel multiple times a day! In contrast, the amount that I wash my sheets at home is relatively unaffected by the amount of sex I've been having or not having (perhaps I shouldn't admit that, but I'm not sure if you people are real anyway). So proper conservation-minded liberals should avoid love hotels just due to the far higher marginal environmental damage of sex there.

IIRC, is measured in bacterial count on a given surface.

Yeah, but it's not all bacteria it's the same bacteria that are counted (at least in reasonable studies).

In other words, there have been studies finding more fecal bacteria in kitchen sinks than in toilets.

So it isn't a good bacteria/bad bacteria issue. And it certainly isn't a justification for the all-antibacterial all-the-time cleaning supply folks either, that's pretty stupid.

er, 'in toilets' should have been 'on toilets', different thing.

Whether or not they're counting the same bacteria doesn't matter much unless the bacteria they're counting are literally the ones that are going to make you ill, or are at least reliably correlated with the population of pathogens that are going to make you ill, no?

Eh. The "Your kitchen is actually swarming with bacteria -- you think it's clean, but it really isn't!!!!!" thing annoys me, because generally people don't get sick often from home cooked food. If the kitchen appears clean, and the bacterial population isn't causing illness, than in what sense is it really nasty? I might be more sympathetic to the comparison if it were phrased as "Your toilet bowl is shockingly clean!!!"

"Your toilet bowl is shockingly clean!!!"

Yeah, this makes more sense as a way to frame it.

And yet, yes the bacteria that are literally the ones that are going to make you ill tend to concentrate in the kitchen, not the bathroom --- for various reasons.

I brought this up not because of `bacteria, ick, get the anti-bacterial soap for everything', which I think is stupid, but for as support for the idea that peoples intuition on this is really not very good.

Hrm. If you're talking about actual illness risk, though, aren't a lot of the pathogens that underlie the fear of illness caused by fecal contamination not bacteria, but single-celled or larger parasites? I really want to resist the counterintuitive conclusion that conventional wisdom about the sort of sanitary precautions sufficient to ward off illness is all wrong -- it just seems unlikely that it should be, and more likely that there's something oversimplified about the measurement that led to that conclusion. I could be wrong, but I'm dragging my heels.

Most of the things that make you sick from fecal contamination are picked up from other animals though. Most of which I hope aren't using your bathroom.

The other possibility is contamination from other people that already have some kind of gastro-intestinal infection which isn't that common at least in the first world. Not to mention bacteria can travel pretty far in the air so are probably going to land all over if someone has explosive diarrhea.

I'm generally pro-bacteria in that I think getting exposure to a wide range of potential pathogens in low doses is actually a good thing for keeping your immune system tuned up. It's the spooge that bothers me. Completely irrational, I realize, but since it's not really interfering with any major life activities at this point I'm not going to waste time trying to squelch it.

60: You are really taking this pretty seriously.

exposure to a wide range of potential pathogens in low doses is actually a good thing for keeping your immune system tuned up

This is why I shit in my kitchen sink once a week.

If whatever it is has been washed

You think the blankets and bedspreads get washed between guests every time? Well, no harm in that, if it helps you sleep at night.

63: Yep. I've got just about two settings: too bored by a topic to focus at all, and reasonably seriously interested.

65: If I can't tell, I don't mind.

Dried up non-commercial residual sex juice is much purer than the prostitution variety.

47: I was at a hotel recently that made a specific point of mentioning that all the bedclothes, including the duvet, had been laundered.

`bacteria, ick, get the anti-bacterial soap for everything', which I think is stupid means we'll all be attacked by super-bacteria so virulent we'll be nostalgic for the halcyon days of ebola.

64 - it's more effective if you have other people do it for you. Preferably people you wouldn't be exposed to in the course of daily activities. Invite a homeless guy in every so often and have him do it.

homeless guy

Sexist.

Most of the things that make you sick from fecal contamination are picked up from other animals though. Most of which I hope aren't using your bathroom.

Where the hell am I supposed to do my slaughtering and butchering? I'm trying to keep fecal contamination out of the kitchen.

73: The hall closet -- shockingly, the dirtiest room in the house. At least mine is. I should probably check to see what happened to those drifters I locked in there last year.

73, Contractors will install a suitable area for reasonable rates, if you can sacrifice a room you don't use too often, preferably a sunroom. Just call one up and ask what their rates are for someone who wants a killing flor.

73: I find that the foyer of my building works well enough. I think the other tenants have been too scared to complain.

62 gets it right. It's not about the risk of infection due to bacteria, etc. etc., it's the squick factor. Which is, admittedly, more pronounced if the hotel room actually looks soiled.

In Puerto Rico years ago, friends and I found ourselves attempting to stay overnight at one Hotel Cupido. Our Spanish was not quite good enough, and his English not good enough, for us to get until after several minutes that he was asking us for how many hours we wanted the rooms. Overnight! Overnight, dammit! Until the morning!

Squicky place, complete with an arrangement whereby the door to each room (it was more like a motel) was through the garage: you drove your car into the garage and shut the door, then entered into the room from the back of the garage. No windows, needless to say. Dispensers for various things in the bathroom, and some kind of thing above the bed where you inserted quarters to get 5 minutes of the bed vibrating. Cool.

sacrifice a room

Sacrifice a room to be the sacrifice room? I like it!

it's more effective if you have other people do it

But way, way less gratifying.

an travel pretty far in the air so are probably going to land all over if someone has explosive diarrhea.

Or a small child.

which I think is stupid means we'll all be attacked by super-bacteria so virulent we'll be nostalgic for the halcyon days of ebola.

I was going for the short form there, Sir Kraab.

I like the poster of the woman, where at the bottom in big letters it says S E X.

I'd like to think that this is the room for people who like to fantasize they're in that part of One Hundred Years of Solitude where the town gets contagious amnesia and they put up signs reminding everyone of everything ("God Exists" etc...).

I myself don't get squicky at all over people having done it there, but that when they did they were only in it for the money, eeeew, nasty.

|| Is this the sex thread? If so, are " these two a descripit old dying man's worst nightmare or his fondest dream?

Typing via blackberry or something, eh, PGD?

84: PGD? Did you want to finish your thought?

Well, I like descripit old dying man in any case.

Unfortunately, I lost the web link to the mug shot of two beautiful young teen girls arrested for groping and molesting old men in the nursing home they volunteered at. That link was what made the whole comment really come together.

Isn't it weird how all these rooms look they actually belong to specific prostitutes, somehow? Esepcially the one with the wardrobe or the cluttery side table. . ..how strange to have your very own bedroom also be your "office" . . . .