427-1! Wow. Historic. One repugnant from the State of Louisiana, Clay Higgens, voted not to release the Epstein Files. Let’s all enjoy Nick Muller today.
And, finally, one more, as this really explains the level of corruption that is all things tRump.
Kudos to Nick Muller
Thank you for reading today's post. Have an InterStellar Day! ~PrP
I strongly suggest that people get into holding XRP, NOW!
The Hidden Ways Restaurants Take Extra Money From Your Wallet – Recipe Heaven
https://recipeheaven.com/the-hidden-ways-restaurants-take-extra-money-from-your-wallet/?utm_source=zsha256-9f0a3b1720d5d822cbdff9d44652ac1806bfc33eca8d02d55f171adfc86bb053&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=native
Credit card charges get mysteriously bumped up
You might be extra careful about checking the bill before you pay, but what about after? Many people have reported finding mysterious increases in charges after leaving the restaurant. The waiter runs your card, you sign the receipt with the tip included, but then later – surprise! – the charge on your statement is higher than what you agreed to pay. It might be a small amount like an extra dollar or two that you’d barely notice, but multiplied across hundreds of customers, it adds up fast for the restaurant.
This happens more often than you’d think. In some cases, it’s a genuine mistake, but other times it’s a deliberate attempt to squeeze extra money from customers who don’t check their statements carefully. Some diners have reported altered charges or added fees that weren’t mentioned when they paid their bill. The amounts are often small enough that most people won’t go through the hassle of disputing them, but large enough to boost the restaurant’s bottom line significantly over time.
Tip suggestions get calculated wrong on purpose
Those helpful tip suggestions at the bottom of your receipt? They might not be so helpful after all. Many restaurants now calculate suggested tip amounts based on the post-tax total rather than the pre-tax amount, which quietly increases how much you’re tipping. Others have been caught using even sneakier methods. Some receipts show tip percentages that don’t actually match the math when calculated against your bill. A $50 meal with a suggested “20% tip” might show $12 instead of $10.
This practice has caused enough outrage that people are starting to call restaurants out publicly. One restaurant receipt went viral on social media when customers noticed the suggested tip percentages were inflated well beyond the percentages shown. Critics accused the restaurant of using deceptive tactics to manipulate customers into overpaying. While the difference might seem small, it’s yet another way restaurants are trying to extract more money from your wallet without being obvious about it.
Hidden fees appear out of nowhere
Have you noticed all those new fees popping up on your bill lately? “Kitchen appreciation fee,” “wellness surcharge,” “service fee” – these are all relatively new additions to restaurant bills across the country. Unlike tips that go to servers, these fees often go straight to the restaurant’s pocket. And they’re almost always in fine print or mentioned only after you’ve already ordered and eaten. By the time you see these charges, you’re already committed to paying them.
These hidden fees are a form of deceptive pricing that erodes consumer trust. Instead of simply raising menu prices (which customers would notice), restaurants add these fees to maintain the illusion of lower prices. The worst part? Many customers assume these charges are required by law or that they replace tipping – neither of which is typically true. You end up paying the fees AND still feeling obligated to tip, effectively paying twice for service.
They count on you not checking your bill
Mistakes happen, but they seem to happen a lot more often in the restaurant’s favor. Items you didn’t order suddenly appear on your bill. You get charged for the premium version of a drink when you ordered the regular. The happy hour discount doesn’t get applied even though you ordered during happy hour. These “mistakes” are common, and restaurants know that most people won’t catch them – especially after a few drinks or when splitting the bill with friends.
In one case documented by Consumer Reports, a diner was charged twice for the same meal and only discovered it when reviewing their credit card statement days later. The restaurant claimed it was an accident, but these “accidents” are suspiciously common. Some restaurateurs admit privately that they train staff to add items or upgrades that customers might not notice – it’s seen as a way to boost the average check size with minimal pushback.
Digital menus make price changes invisible
Remember when you could go back to a restaurant and order your “usual” for about the same price? Those days are gone. With digital menus and QR codes replacing paper menus, restaurants can now change prices constantly without customers noticing. They might charge more during busy hours or on weekends – a practice called dynamic pricing. You could literally pay a different price for the same meal depending on when you order it, and you’d never know unless you were keeping careful track.
Digital menus also make it easier for restaurants to test different pricing strategies in real-time. They can raise the price of a popular item by a dollar and see if sales drop. If they don’t, the price stays higher. This practice, combined with the overall trend of price increases, means you’re likely paying more for the same food than the person at the next table who ate there last month. Without physical menus to compare, these incremental increases go unnoticed by most customers, who simply accept whatever price is shown when they order.
What to do if you spot these tricks
So what can you do about all this? First, always check your bill line by line before paying. Make sure you weren’t charged for items you didn’t order or at prices different from what was listed. Calculate the tip yourself instead of using the suggested amounts. And most importantly, check your credit card statement against your receipt copy a few days later to catch any post-payment increases. If you do find a discrepancy, call the restaurant immediately and ask for an explanation.
Don’t be afraid to speak up when you spot these tricks. Most restaurants will correct “mistakes” quickly when caught. You can also use cash when possible to avoid credit card manipulation. Some customers have started using a “checksum” method when tipping – adding cents to their total that make it easy to spot if the amount changes later. For instance, if your bill is $45.20 and you want to tip $9, make the total $54.23 instead of $54.20. The odd amount makes it easier to spot changes when reviewing your statement.
Being aware of these sneaky tricks is your best defense against restaurant overcharging. While most establishments are honest, the industry-wide pressure to increase profits has led many places to adopt these deceptive practices. By staying alert and checking your bills carefully, you can enjoy eating out without paying more than you should. Remember – it’s your money, and you have every right to make sure you’re not being charged unfairly for your meal.
Never Buy Pre-Cut Fruit Unless You Want These Problems – Recipe Heaven
https://recipeheaven.com/never-buy-pre-cut-fruit-unless-you-want-these-problems/?utm_source=zsha256-9f0a3b1720d5d822cbdff9d44652ac1806bfc33eca8d02d55f171adfc86bb053&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=native
The Beef Cut Butchers Say You Should Never Skip – Recipe Heaven
https://recipeheaven.com/the-beef-cut-butchers-say-you-should-never-skip/
Restaurant Menu Items That Are Complete Ripoffs You Should Avoid – Recipe Heaven
https://recipeheaven.com/restaurant-menu-items-that-are-complete-ripoffs-you-should-avoid/
Secrets Olive Garden Never Wanted You To Know – Recipe Heaven
https://recipeheaven.com/secrets-olive-garden-never-wanted-you-to-know/
“I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all”
At 12, her boyfriend led her into the woods.
A dozen boys were waiting.
She told no one for years—then she wrote it down and changed how we talk about survival.
Roxane Gay had a happy childhood in Omaha, Nebraska. Her Haitian immigrant parents doted on her. They bought her a typewriter when they discovered she liked inventing stories. She was shy, awkward, and found solace in books. She was close with her two younger brothers.
She was twelve years old when her boyfriend asked her to meet him in the woods.
“There was an incident,” Roxane would later say in her TED Talk, choosing those careful words. “I call it an incident so I can carry the burden of what happened.”
Her boyfriend had brought friends. A dozen of them. They took turns.
“Some boys broke me,” she said, “when I was so young, I did not know what boys can do to break a girl. They treated me like I was nothing.”
She came home a completely different person. But she didn’t tell anyone—not her loving parents, not her brothers, not a single adult who might have helped.
Instead, she started eating.
“I knew exactly what I was doing,” Roxane would later write. “I just thought, ‘I am going to start to eat and I am going to get fat and I am going to be able to protect myself because boys don’t like fat girls.'”
She gained weight rapidly, deliberately building what she would later call her “fortress”—armor made of flesh to keep the world at a distance. Her bewildered parents watched their daughter transform before their eyes and couldn’t understand why.
When she came home from Phillips Exeter Academy—one of the most prestigious boarding schools in America—for vacation, her parents would restrict her diet. She’d lose weight. The moment someone complimented her figure, she’d pile it back on.
At Yale University, where she’d enrolled in pre-med, the carefully constructed facade finally cracked. At 19, Roxane ran away with a man she met online—someone 25 years older. It was a relief, she said, to stop pretending to be the well-adjusted daughter everyone expected.
It took her parents a year to find her.
She returned to Nebraska, dropped out of Yale, and had to rebuild from scratch. She earned her master’s degree, then her PhD. She became a professor. She started writing—not just stories, but erotica under pseudonyms, essays, criticism, anything that let her process what she couldn’t speak aloud.
In 2012, nearly two decades after the attack, Roxane finally wrote about it.
She published “What We Hunger For” on The Rumpus, a literary website. The essay was raw, unflinching, and devastating. It didn’t just describe what happened in those woods—it mapped the aftermath, the decades of living inside a body she’d weaponized against intimacy and vulnerability.
The response was immediate. Women wrote to her by the hundreds, the thousands. They recognized themselves in her words—the silence, the shame, the elaborate strategies for survival that looked like self-destruction.
Two years later, in 2014, Roxane published “Bad Feminist”—a collection of essays that would make her a cultural icon.
The title itself was an act of defiance. She called herself a “bad feminist” because she loved things that contradicted feminist principles—certain rap lyrics, pink, romance novels. She argued that feminism needed to make room for human imperfection, that demanding flawless adherence to doctrine was exclusionary and counterproductive.
“I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all,” she wrote.
The book became a New York Times bestseller. Suddenly, Roxane Gay was everywhere—writing opinion columns for The New York Times, The Guardian, Salon. Teaching at universities. Editing literary journals. Speaking at conferences.
And the labels started.
When she wrote about race, she was called divisive. When she wrote about feminism, she was called too demanding. When she wrote about her weight, she was called unhealthy, a bad role model, someone promoting obesity.
When she challenged the publishing industry’s lack of diversity, she was labeled difficult.
Roxane noticed a pattern: “A woman who demands equality is labeled difficult, emotional, or crazy. That tells you exactly who benefits from her silence.”
She’d spent two decades in silence after her assault. She knew intimately what silence protected—and it wasn’t her.
So she kept writing.
In 2014, she published her debut novel “An Untamed State,” about a woman kidnapped in Haiti and subjected to weeks of sexual violence. The protagonist’s journey through trauma and toward survival mirrored Roxane’s own.
In 2017, she published “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.”
The book was divided into two sections: “The Before” and “The After.” The dividing line was that day in the woods when she was twelve. Everything in her life—her relationship with food, her body, her sexuality, her sense of safety—flowed from that moment.
“I was scared of tackling the history of my body,” she admitted. But she did it anyway, describing in exacting detail what it’s like to live in a body the world judges, fears, and dismisses. A body she’d built as protection that became its own prison.
Critics called it “ferociously honest,” “arresting and candid,” “intimate and vulnerable.” It became another New York Times bestseller.
In 2018, she edited “Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture”—an anthology featuring essays from 30 writers about their experiences with sexual violence. The title itself was subversive, capturing how survivors minimize their own trauma to make others comfortable.
That same year, she collaborated with Tracy Lynne Oliver to become the first Black woman to write for Marvel Comics, working on “Black Panther: World of Wakanda.”
She launched Gay Magazine in 2019. She started podcasts, wrote graphic novels, published more essay collections. Her work earned the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award, and countless other honors.
But with every achievement came more labels.
When she spoke about systemic racism, she was called radical. When she wrote about police reform and prison abolition, she was called dangerous. When she demanded better from institutions, she was called ungrateful.
“Call a woman difficult and you question her competence,” Roxane wrote. “Call her emotional and you dismiss her logic. Call her crazy and you erase her entirely. Each word is designed to push her back into silence.”
She understood these weren’t random insults. They were tools—precision instruments for maintaining power structures.
But she also understood something else: “If her silence benefits someone, then her voice threatens someone.”
Roxane Gay refused to be silent anymore.
She wrote about Haiti, her parents’ homeland, pushing back against narratives that reduced it to poverty and violence. She wrote about the immigrant experience, about identity, about pop culture and politics and everything in between.
She mentored an entire generation of writers—people like Saeed Jones and Ashley Ford, who said “an entire generation of writers will likely have Roxane to thank.”
In 2021, she launched “The Audacity,” a newsletter and book club featuring work by underrepresented authors.
Today, Roxane Gay is one of the most influential cultural critics in America. Her essays shape national conversations. Her books are taught in universities. Her voice—the one those boys tried to silence in the woods when she was twelve—reaches millions.
She never claims to be healed. “I am as healed as I’m ever going to be at this point,” she writes honestly.
But she proved something profound about survival: that speaking your truth, even decades later, can shatter the silence that protects abusers and stifles change.
The girl who built a fortress out of her body became the woman who built a career out of her voice.
And every time someone calls her difficult, emotional, or too much—she knows she’s telling a truth someone hoped she would never say.