thaiophilus

You can always email them (despite the websites I've never booked them any other way): info (at) malaysiahotelbkk.com should get a reply within a day.

Historically I think their prices were considered low for what they offered, so maybe there has been some catching up in recent years. As for refitting, not in January - they had freshened the paintwork, but nothing you'd call a major refit of the "superior" (meaning standard) rooms. But if I try to book via their own website for 25-26 December (representative of high season), it's offering a "flash sale" superior room for only B800, or 900 with breakfast. If you assume the "sale" is an early-booking discount of 20%, the price is no different from a year ago.

Ah. Yes, I see the difference. The OYO branding is new. It's difficult to determine the real room prices now, with so many booking site "special deals", but when I stayed there in January 2019 the rate was B1090 for a "single superior" room. Rates I have paid (for early January of the year noted): 2007: B688 2008: B708 2009-2012: B808 2014-2016: B868 2017-2018: B950 2019: B1090 I don't seem to have records for 1996-2006, when my bookings were probably made by fax (and there were real multipart airline tickets!).

The Malaysia recently celebrated 50 years of ownership by the Ma family with some redecoration and mildly increased prices, but I don't believe the owners or their policies have changed.

Stijntje is right. Websites that store actual passwords are not secure by today's standards. Anyone at the hosting service where the database is stored can access the passwords of everybody using this site. So can anyone who knows how to hack into the hosting service, and there are plenty of those - see the frequent headlines. Yes, you can mitigate the risk following z909's recommendations (I certainly do!) but even so, someone hostile (and there must be many people who disapprove of this site) could use your credentials to impersonate you here. Best practice "industry standard" 2019-style requires that at a minimum, any site with password access should store not the password but some kind of cryptographic hash of it. When you log in, the system computes the hash from your password, discards the password and compares its hash with the hash in the database. The password itself is never stored anywhere, and if anyone steals the database they cannot easily reverse the hash to recover the password. The fact that the site is SSL secured is irrelevant here - that protects your password against eavesdroppers as you log in, which is good, but it does nothing to protect the password database itself. (Incidentally, SSL hasn't been best practice for the last decade or so, having been replaced by TLS .) Emailing a forgotten password is also anything but best practice, since email is totally insecure, and messages could be read by anyone with access to any of the many routers and switches the email passes through. Bottom line: Any site that can tell you your password if you lose it, can tell anyone else too. Any site that tells you your password by email has also told an unknown number of other people. That's why if you forget a password, most of the sites you interact with today will email you, not the new password but a link to an HTTPS connection to create a new password. They don't tell you the old password, because they don't know it.

There were far fewer families and straight couples back then. It's only recently that Pattaya has been marketed as a "family" destination. Also Jomtien was less developed, and didn't have all the hotels and condos that populate the beach today.

I don't know how you can say that. After all, they have done it no less than 20 times since 1932

My experience too, though most people (anecdotally at least) report having more problems in the opposite direction.

Don't hold your breath. When I reported an error, it took several months for them to move Na Kluea from the Big Buddha to its true location. And looking just now I see the Big Buddha is currently "Gran Buda".

Do they normalize by the number of aircraft the airline owns, number of passengers carried, passenger miles travelled? If not, those figures may be facts but what you can infer from them is very limited. Even if normalized, they are still not very useful. Fatal crashes are rare events (at least for airlines visiting first-world destinations, or the regulators would ban them pretty quickly :-) so statistically they are outlying near-random noise on the tail of the distribution. Serious accidents usually only happen when more than one thing goes wrong at the same time, and often procedures are changed as a result of the accident investigation, so the same combination of events won't happen next time. On the other hand, some lessons learned are then forgotten, so a "safe" airline may become less safe through complacency. Also, 20 years is a long time in corporate terms, and the management of today's airline may have nothing in common with what it was 20 years ago. Simple example: airline A makes two daily long-haul flights per day and has had one fatal crash in the last 20 years, airline B has 500 regional flights a day and has had two fatal crashes. Does that make airline A twice as safe as B? Then consider Airline C which has had none at all. Are they "infinitely" more safe than A or B? Or are we just looking at events that are so unlikely the statistics have no predictive value?

I agree with the sentiment, but there's another reason you might need (not want) to receive some calls: two-factor authentication... If my bank spots "unusual" activity on my credit card, quite likely when I'm abroad with different spending patterns, they send a text message to my home number. If I don't respond they are likely to block the card.

Theravada Buddhism doesn't do excluded middles, so also it will be neither there nor not there, and both there and not there. All at once.

If you're travelling during the day between Pattaya and Suvarnabhumi, don't overlook the Bell bus. It's twice the price of the regular buses at 240B and must be pre-booked online (go to https://ticket.belltravelservice.com/customer/Webhome and select "shared transfer"), but that fare includes a minibus transfer between the Pattaya North bus terminal and your hotel. Unfortunately there's nothing similar from other parts of BKK.

"My sister was tested and has the delta 32 gene, which I assume means I have it." Sorry, that doesn't follow. On average, you only share half your sister's genes. (If you had all of them, you'd be a girl ;-) Your sister has the delta 32 *mutation* in one or both of her CCR5 *genes*. We all have two copies of that gene, one from each of our parents, who also have two copies... At conception we get a random 50-50 choice of one of our father's two CCR5 genes and one of our mother's. The fact that your sister has the mutation means that one or both parents has the mutation on one or both genes. So there are four possibilities, with rapidly decreasing probability: (1) one parent has the mutation on one gene, the other hasn't - 1% (2) each parent has the mutation on one gene - 0.01% (3) one parent has the mutation on both genes, the other hasn't - 0.01% (4) one parent has the mutation on both genes, the other has it on one - 0.0001% (5) both parents have it on both genes - 0.000001% (assuming the allele frequency of the mutation is 1%, and your parents aren't closely related, e.g. some sort of cousins) The probability that you have the mutation in each case is: (1) 50% - one throw out of two you get the mutation from the one parent who has it (2) 75% - one throw out of four, you get two unmutated copies (3, 4) 100% - one parent has the mutation on both genes, so you are guaranteed one of them. But to be protected you need the mutation on both genes, and the probabilities of that are (1, 3) 0% - one parent has two unmutated genes, so you are bound to get one of them (2) 25% - one time in four you get the mutated gene from both parents (4) 50% - one parent has both mutated and unmutated genes, so fifty-fifty whether you get an unmutated one (5) 100% - neither parent has the unmutated gene. [E&OE]

Anyone who visits Pattaya more than once can never leave... On a dark desert highway Cool wind in my hair Warm smell of colitas Rising up through the air Up ahead in the distance I saw a shimmering light My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim I had to stop for the night. There she stood in the doorway. I heard the mission bell And I was thinking to myself "This could be Heaven or this could be Hell" Then she lit up a candle And she showed me the way There were voices down the corridor I thought I heard them say "Welcome to the Hotel Pattayaland Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place) Such a lovely face Plenty of room at the Hotel Pattayaland Any time of year (Any time of year) You can find it here" Her mind is Tiffany-twisted She got the Mercedes Bends She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys She calls friends How they dance in the gogos Sweet summer sweat Some dance to remember Some dance to forget So I called up the Captain "Please bring me my wine" He said, "We haven't had that spirit here since 1969" And still those voices are calling from far away Wake you up in the middle of the night Just to hear them say "Welcome to the Hotel Pattayaland Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place) Such a lovely face They living it up at the Hotel Pattayaland What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise) Bring your alibis" Mirrors on the ceiling The pink champagne on ice And she said: "We are all just prisoners here Of our own device" And in the master's chambers They gathered for the feast They stab it with their steely knives But they just can't kill the beast Last thing I remember, I was running for the door I had to find the passage back To the place I was before "Relax," said the night man "We are programmed to receive You can check out any time you like But you can never leave!" [with apologies to Don Henley]

Closed when I passed by tonight :-(

Back to the topic ... I walked past tonight and it was definitely closed, in darkness, chain and padlock on the door. Whether temporary or permanent I have no idea.

Today the Malaysia Hotel celebrates its 50th anniversary. I think any business that has been successfully delivering the same services at much the same prices for half a century must have a pretty good USP (even if it's nothing more than nostalgia) and deserves congratulations. Here's to the next 50 years! Anyone here who remembers checking in on 3 January 1968?

Any suggestions on what are the best gogo shows in BKK right now? I'm not greatly interested in lip-synching ladyboys (their backing boy dancers maybe) or non-stop big cocks ( nothing against them but seen one, seen all) What would be good is variety: a bit of humour, lots of naked flesh, a bit of art, a bit of sleaze, the sort of mix I first saw 20 years ago. Barbiery, or the old Jupiter? Can't remember. (Apologies for asking a question that's already been answered in other places, but searching this one topic among all the other valuable information is near impossible on a tiny not-very-smart phone.)

Any chance you could remember which establishment? I expect a number of readers would be interested in a visit ;-)

Agreed, that kind of ranking is useless GIGO, but some of those cities probably score higher than Bangkok on at least one axis. Random statistic, proving nothing: when I was in Reykjavik a few years ago, estimated turnout for the Pride parade (led by the mayor in drag), 90,000 people (and judging by my observations that figure is plausible.) That's more than a quarter of the population of Iceland.

Yes, Nicky retired, closed the site and put the domains up for sale about the same time as he published his book. The site was still there (if not actively updated) in late 2016 as I downloaded some pages from it then. A shame it's gone, as it was frequently updated and most places of interest were listed. Still I suppose a clean break is better than leaving a fossil to decay and become more and more misleading as time goes on. The Japanese massage site is here For the sake of completeness there are also these sites I bookmarked at various times, but they may be seriously out of date or too selective to be useful: Utopia-Asia (very selective/censored coverage, e.g. no mention of gogo bars at all!) Sticky Rice (last "latest stories" 2014) GayThailand "city guides" (no comment) ...and many others that are now totally defunct. And once upon a time there was no Internet and the only source of information was The Men Of Thailand and word of mouth..

That's a shame. I was told back in January that Narcissus had been sold as a going concern (ie running as before but under new management) and that the former owner intended to use the money to buy a bar (not massage) in Jomtien. TiT.

It's 100% security theatre. They have no idea what they are looking for, or what they would do if they found it.

If I'm reading it right, the bather made the video and the sarcastic comments himself, to make a point about someone's failure to repair the broken pipe. Not an opportunistic bath but a political statement.