Beau Elliot
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Sometimes in this life — oh, wait, this is a life? Why didn’t somebody tell us? Just like them. They never tell us anything. Except where to buy the next electronic Big Thing.

You have the next Big Thing already?

I was going to wait until the Big Thing price came down, three months or so from now, things being as they are. But you’re right; by that time, the next Big Thing will be on the event horizon. (Which is quite the event; just ask any passing physicist. There’s always one around in Iowa City; they’re like writers in this burg.)

But sometimes in this life you wake up and wonder, What ever happened to Stephanie Norlander?

You remember her — big field-hockey star for the Hawkeyes, two-time second-team All-American, 2015 Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year in the Big Ten as a junior. Now, I don’t know diddly about field hockey (though the players seem to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice about carrying a big stick), but Norlander sounds like big star to me. Big senior season coming, right?

Um, no. Norlander, who’s Canadian (really Canadian, not like Ted Cruz) decided to forgo her senior Hawk season and join the Canadian National Team. Oh, well. Some college athletes do that; look at basketball players and football players jumping to the pros. So that’s not so weird.

What’s weird is that, after Norlander announced her decision, her name was erased from the 2015 field-hockey roster on the Hawkeye website. Yep. Gone. The best player on the 2015 team doesn’t exist.

Kind of reminds you of the Soviet-era purges in which a high-ranking official would be purged for whatever reason and then his image would be erased from all the official photos. No, he doesn’t exist.

Difference in scale, I understand. But still. Weird things have happened around the field-hockey program recently. And this one is weird.

Of course, once you get your mind off Hawkeye field hockey (hard to do, I know), you see that weirdness is almost everywhere. Take Sen. and GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz (remember him?) and his family’s health insurance. Cruz recently, and famously, said on the campaign trail that he and his family no longer have health insurance because of Obamacare. (If it’s a trail, why doesn’t it trail off?)

Oh, my. Oh, dear. A senator without health insurance? The republic is falling into chaos.

Except that Cruz lied, or was mistaken, depending on your worldview and whether you had yogurt with a grain of sea salt for breakfast. Cruz and his family do have health insurance; his campaign aides admitted as much after the story broke.

As a matter of face, according to the LA Times, some 13,000 members of Congress and their aides have health insurance through Obamacare. And they get federal government subsidies for that insurance, because, you know, they’re all so poor. Shatters your heart, doesn’t it?

Speaking of subsidies, and weirdness, it was amusing to see Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., come out with a TV ad in Iowa in which he promised to get the government out of the farms. Amusing, because Rubio has been a supporter of farm subsidies, which is government in the farms. Weird, beccause Rubio has been a huge, huge, huge supporter of sugar subsidies; that Florida has a gigantic sugar industry is probably just a coincidence.

So many coincidences; weird, isn’t it?