I obviously enjoy a good April Fool’s joke. For instance, my wife and I were married in August and we had some very nice invitations printed and sent to all our friends. Seven months later, I sent every one of them another invitation, in the same type of style and envelope, that said “Michael A. Ventrella and Heidi Hooper invite you to join with them as they exchange divorce papers, April 1, at the Middlesex Courthouse, Boston, Massachusetts. RSVP.”
“A jester unemployed is nobody’s fool!”
It’s a cute joke, no one was hurt, and no one took it seriously.
It’s why I enjoy the kind of jokes certain newspapers and web pages play on April 1st, like the one in England today discussing how they are moving Stonehenge like they do every six months because of Daylight Savings’ Time.
April Fools though has become a bit less fun because (a) we have lots of websites doing these sorts of things every day (Hello, Onion!); and (b) everyone can post their crap on Facebook and usually it’s not very smart and often mean; instead of being clever and humorous, it’s just a lie and then they yell “April Fools” as if it’s the funniest and wittiest thing ever.
I feel sorry for those people who really do lose loved ones today.
So no, you won’t see an April Fool’s joke from me unless I come up with something really clever.
Sometimes it seems like the Republicans are the Bully Party and the Democrats are the Wimpy party. (Or maybe that makes the Republicans the Bluto party?)
I remember the Dukakis campaign. I lived in Boston at the time and did a little work on it and recall how the senior Bush called Dukakis a “liberal” as if it was a bad thing — that Dukakis should be ashamed. Dukakis wimped out and didn’t stand up and say “Yes, I am a liberal, like John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, and I am proud of that” until about a week before the election, when it was too late. Instead, liberals cowed down and started calling themselves “progressives” because “liberal” suddenly became bad. Wimps.
The GOP still sets the agenda by bullying their way in, and the Democrats let them. The Republicans claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility and morality and everything else and rarely do Democrats challenge them on this like they should. The GOP is now claiming that Obamacare is a terrible disaster when studies show that it is successful, and that a majority of Americans like it. Yet Democrats are cowering because they are too frightened to embrace things that the American public wants.
“Obamacare will be a disaster!” the conservatives screamed. “There’s no way we’ll get 5 million people to sign up for it!” We’re at 6.5 million as of today, but how many Democrats do you see proclaiming that victory? Why aren’t the Democrats touting all the success stories about people who are covered now that previously weren’t, and who are paying much less? Instead, we get Republican commercials full of lies. (Of course, some of that is due to the Koch brothers spending billions to spread their propaganda, which is very hard to overcome.)
But the public is on our side.
Americans often categorize themselves as “conservative,” but their views on the issues align with Democrats more often than they do with Republicans.
A majority of Americans support Obamacare. A majority thinks gay marriage, abortion and marijuana should be legal. A majority supports more gun control. A majority want to raise the minimum wage and do something about campaign finance reform. A majority wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and do not believe that “corporations are people.”
These positions are not radical dreams of the left. They are mainstream. For Democrats to shy away from what a majority of Americans want is ridiculous.
“Frozen” just set the record for highest grossing animated film of all time (as of 2014, when this was originally posted), but these things can be misleading. After all, you have to adjust for inflation.
I used to edit and write for a magazine called “Animato!” which was about animated films, and we would periodically update the “adjusted for inflation” chart. For today’s purposes, we’ll use Box Office Mojo’s list and statistics. 
Not surprisingly, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” wins this one. It was a huge success back in the days when there was no TV and everyone went to the movies. It also has the benefit of being re-released every ten years or so, bringing in a new generation and racking up even more dollars. This was the standard for almost all Disney animated films until video came along. (And the list below does not take into consideration video sales.)
This list is for domestic films so doesn’t take into consideration world wide sales, which would be next to impossible to calculate based on inflation.
To make matters worse, since the pandemic, more films are being released through streaming services only, so there are no “ticket sales” to place them on this list. Someday maybe there will be a way to calculate views from downloads and compare them to how many tickets were sold at theaters but we don’t have that yet — and that’s why on this list you won’t see some films released in the last few years that were very popular but were not in theaters.
The Box Office Mojo chart looks like this (updated August 10, 2026):
Our most prominent satirist these days is Stephen Colbert, who plays an ignorant conservative pundit so clueless he doesn’t realize he is saying things that help his opponents. Anyone who has a brain understands the character and gets the jokes.
This is a picture my wife made of Stephen Colbert using dryer lint. It’s now hanging in a Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum somewhere. Her web page is here: http://www.heidihooper.com
And then there are The Humorless.
Recently, Colbert did a hilarious bit about how the Washington Redskins, in order to show their concern for the Native Americans they insult daily with their name, set up a charity to benefit said Natives. They called it “The Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation” — which is kind of like saying “The Washington Wop Foundation for the Betterment of Italian-Americans” or “The Washington Faggot Gay Rights Foundation.”
Or, as Stephen Colbert put it “The Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”
Come on, that’s funny. By using this comparison, he is showing how insensitive the Redskins are being while they pretend to be enlightened. “I owe all this sensitivity to Redskins owner Dan Snyder,” Colbert said after making the announcement. “So Asians, send your thank-you letters to him, not me.”
To add more irony, “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong” was a character Colbert created to make fun of Rush Limbaugh doing a stereotypical racist rant when imitating Chinese President Hu Jintao.
But some people just don’t get it, claiming he has “gone too far” and demanding a boycott of his show. These well-meaning but humor-impaired people are against stereotypes and racism.
Hey, just like Colbert!
Some people distrust science to the point where they destroy their kid’s economic futures. By not encouraging their kids to learn science but actively teaching them non-science (creationism, for instance), we end up with adults who do not understand logic, proof, evidence, and the scientific theory and can’t compete with those who are actually educated.
But this hatred of science hurts us in other ways, too. For instance, denying climate change means we are doing nothing about it — leading to deadly storms, mudslides, fires, and devastation. 
And this isn’t limited to conservatives (as I have pointed out before). There are liberals who laugh at those who deny evolution while they refuse to vaccinate their kids because of some internet rumor they read somewhere.
This is killing us.
You can’t pick and choose what science to believe. Science doesn’t care what you believe, anyway — the fact that you don’t believe in science doesn’t make it not true.
But for some reason, people listen to non-scientists when they make up their minds. Donald Trump is one of those idiots who tweets about vaccinations while his New York city suffers from record-breaking measels and mumps outbreaks. Washington state has a whooping cough epidemic. There’s even a worry that polio could come back. Polio!
Somehow, there is a complete independent streak in America that is so strong that we refuse to listen to experts and “elitists” who know things, and almost always to our detriment. As Isaac Asimov once said, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
ventrellaquest.com 