For previous items, see this and this.
1) Wawa and the mysteries of perception.I have seen these convenience-store signs many times over the past twenty years or so, and I have always noted the oddity of the name, since it wasn't something I'd encountered in my childhood on the other side of the country. For some reason, I had always mentally registered the spelling as "WaWa." It turns out that it is "Wawa." My mistake and apologies.
2) Address-change and the mysteries of perception. I recounted Mitt Romney's story about a doctor (actually optometrist) who was frustrated by filling out a 33-page government form to change his billing address. In context it sounded to me and I assume other people in the crowd as if he was talking about normal address changes as handled by the Post Office. After I mentioned this part of Romney's speech, to explain how he was making his case about public/private differences, many people wrote in to make a point I hadn't: that in fact it's very easy to make a USPS change.
So I went back to see the tape. It is possible though not spelled-out that the optometrist had been talking about getting the Medicare and Medicare systems to change his registered billing address, which could well be more complex. I am not inviting more correspondence on how Medicare billing actually works, nor the merits of its being more complex than the either Wawa or the USPS. (For instance: billing fraud is a huge issue for Medicare / Medicaid, so new addresses are a bigger deal there. Similarly, the first time you ask Amazon to send a shipment to a new address, they require extra verification.) I am saying that if this is what the optometrist had in mind when telling his story to Romney, then the 33 pages make a lot more sense.
