Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Random thoughts for today

How about some random thoughts today? OK, here goes:

When I was a boy, I liked to ask my friends a question.

I had discovered pretty early in life that I had the world's best mother. When I would visit my friends, I discovered that they did not have the world's best mother. That was because (1) their mothers didn't make grilled cheese sandwiches like my mother did and (2) there could only be one world's best mother (that's why they call it "world's best") and my own mother was already the world's best.

So having discovered this truth about the world, I would ask my friends this question: "Who would you rather have as your mother, my mother or your mother?"

I was always stunned by the answer: The friend always wanted his own mother to be his mother, even if she had just grounded him.

And my friends were probably always stunned by my reaction: I could not believe they wanted their own mother and not my mother to be their mother.

In fact, I was downright offended. How dare they insult my mother like that?

"You're wrong," I would say. "My mother is way better than your mother."

I think that's when I learned to fight.

Anyway, decades later, I'm more sure than ever that my mother, Barbara Bowers Kendrick-Holmes, is the world's best mother. But I'm also willing to concede that there can be more than one world's best mother.

Speaking of world's best mothers, Bess and I attended our youngest son's middle school track meet on Monday.

A middle school track meet is not the world's most exciting event. In fact, a middle school honor society induction is probably more exciting because every child holds a lighted candle, and what's more exciting than a bunch of teenagers holding fire in a crowded assembly?

But Bess was acting like this middle school track meet was the world's most exciting event. She was making note of the scheduled times for each heat, and commenting on the various designs and colors of each track uniform, and

memorizing the names of every student, and picking up the occasional stray Gatorade bottle and Power Bar wrapper, and wondering if perhaps our son should be stretching instead of goofing off in the infield.

Meanwhile, I stretched out on the metal bleachers and took a nap. The sun was still high in the sky, and it was as warm as the sun could be without being hot.

Ten minutes later, I woke up, refreshed and ready to watch some middle school track.

It was not a waste of time.

But I'll tell you what is.

Have you heard about "Emoji Dick"? It's a crowd-sourced translation of "Moby Dick" into Japanese emoticons.

Workers at Amazon Mechanical Turk translated each of the massive novel's 10,000 sentences into emoticons three times. Three times!

Then another set of workers voted on the best translation of the sentence.

In all, about 800 people spent more than 1,000 hours producing the translation, which is available in full-color hardback for only $200.

It's been hailed by at least one Internet site as "astoundingly useless."

I'll say.

I'll also say this: Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers out there. The role you play is astoundingly useful -- and important. Have a great day.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com.

This story was originally published May 8, 2015 at 11:16 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Random thoughts for today."