To paraphrase Sarah Palin, once the convention cheer squad has disappeared and the Styrofoam columns have been removed all you are left with is weird. Or this free tote bag and cloying Kamala and Tim CNN interview with so much ‘their truth’ you feel ill – just like the time you watched Harry and Megan give away cars on Oprah.

Everything is weird, depending on how you look at it. At work, I used to sit opposite a guy who played paintball on Tuesday nights, laser tag Wednesdays and entered the Tough Mudder every year. He said he was on the paleo diet which apparently is eating the way cavemen used to. I watched (and listened) every day at 11.23 a.m. precisely (his body was a dietary ticking alarm clock) as he slurped and crunched raw eggs, nuts and dried vacuum-sealed meats. It really helped his career as he clambered over the other office Cro-Magnons to eventually become a junior manager reporting to a sociopathic boss. So maybe it didn’t really help him much at all. That was weird.

Last week pro-Voice campaigner Shireen Morris gave an insight into the weirdness of identity politics – or at least the Yes campaign. Describing herself as Indian-Australian she wrote that one great hindrance to her campaigning was that fellow campaigners steeped in the rich rules of identity said that ‘Shireen is not Blak’. Or not Blak enough – it’s always hard to quantify these things. She says this criticism was never made to white constitutional lawyers and advisors because their non-Blakness was self-evident. Which just goes to show that some social justice warriors have way too much free time and maybe should take up laser tag.

This is odd, though what I always find odder is how despite railing against the evils of cultural appropriation these campaigners are oblivious to how their agitprop – First Nations (Canada), Blak (USA), BLM (USA) – is borrowed from overseas or at least from an AOC Tik Tok post.

Over in America, Trump v. Harris is now Weird v. Weird as both sides try to define who has the oddest candidate. This itself is weird as it contradicts a generation of rigorously monitored, legislated and tediously enforced societal rules that proscribe describing anyone’s behaviour as weird, odd, unusual, or worst of all, the kryptonite of weird: ‘normal’.

Giddy on rising polls, Harris-Walz are highlighting too many to mention crude and random Trump non sequiturs, his reality-show Orange Man persona, claims of greatest president ever and a predilection for paying porn stars that most of us can only dream of. His running mate J.D. Vance is being attacked for old jokes about childless cat ladies (can we yet again declare the death of irony?), and Walz is perpetuating a discredited social media meme about couches which leaves you wondering how folksy and Midwestern ‘Honest, aww shucks’ Walz is after all.

Trump is returning the ‘they’re weird’ critiques in kind, calling Harris dumb, stupid and wholly dependent on a teleprompter to get through the day. But with him it’s baked into his persona. It seems strange coming from Democrats who constantly claim a higher and saintly moral ground and like to quote Michelle Obama’s famous declaration, ‘As they go low, we go higher,’ while forgetting the other one from Hillary Clinton of a ‘basket of deplorables’ who for some strange reason don’t vote for me.

This may all be fighting political fire with fire, and weirdly funny in a Kamala cackle kind of way. But considering the bigger political picture it’s also counter-productive for American liberals, the Democrats and progressive left generally. If the social guard rails are now down on whether you can designate what is or isn’t normal, how can you act outraged if Republican conservatives or the religious right start banging on about traditional family values and their checklist of what they think constitutes normal behaviour?

America is weird but what’s really weird is whatever they’re putting in the water over at News Limited at the moment. Sometimes it feels like I’m immersed in my own personal heartbalm column as I turn the page. Where can I get more of this action?

Last Saturday’s Weekend Australian had me all hot under the collar reading Nikki Gemmell’s column about what goes on in the bedroom and whether women are getting what they – umm – ‘need’ from their men. Personally, I never have this problem having always followed the Clinton administration ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. Of course, if the transgender debate has taught us nothing else it’s that whatever people choose to do with their genitalia in their spare time is nobody else’s business until they say that it is.

Seeing the article’s ‘endure, submit, succumb’ clickbait headline left me highly flustered, like that time they ran a Dusty Martin front page on Easter Sunday to celebrate the rise of Jesus from the dead. It made me realise there are so many other questions we need to add to the upcoming census, so no one feels frustrated like the lonely women in Nikki’s column.

Having recovered from Nikki, I then broke my personal rule of abstaining from thinking about sex more than once a weekend, when I opened next day’s Herald-Sun to find its ‘Body and Soul 2024 Sex Census’ results. Accompanied with suitably racy and glossy hot bod images that left me feeling strangely inadequate, Albo could do worse than read this survey to work out what questions to include in the next census and maybe add some semi-naked imagery to ensure that people actually complete it.

Most disturbing were results showing 66 per cent of Australian Gen Z’s identify as heterosexual, which just goes to show how far the fight against homophobia still has to go. Why not 50 per cent, I say, or even that mythical net zero Chris Bowen and Adam Bandt keep talking about when they’re not encouraging us all to take cold showers.

Net zero heterosexuality has a certain UN-mandated feel to it and would certainly help get rid of all those annoying crying babies we have to deal with when trying to work out if we’re Blak enough while at our favourite café. What’s more, in 50 years, we won’t have to worry about global warming anymore either.