Miles To Go.

Hopes. Dashed.

Ugh.

I grew up in the shadow of PSU, the veritable Emerald City for athletes like me. For my  generation it was hope incarnate; now it’s blown to bits.

Let’s face it, most of us in Western PA were headed for the coal mines or the steel mills, and distinguishing oneself on the gridiron was one way out, longshot but true. (See an early Tom Cruise in All the Right Moves for a taste of what I’m talking about). Every kid on my team knew that Beaver Country, PA produced an incredible number of NFL QB’s, (Namath, Unitas, Marino, Kelly, Hanratty, Blanda, Gannon top the list) and perhaps one of us would have the chance to join them.

I love the quote “Man never forgets where he ran as a boy”. No doubt, this is one reason why.

If we could just get a break we often thought to ourselves, and get noticed at one of the big programs… Hope can be so powerful, but so misleading at times. It was that hope that lured and betrayed young men at Happy Valley. And it was the almost deific influence of one man who allowed people to replace doing what’s right with doing what must be done. Penn State will never be the same, but that’s probably good in the long run.

Greg Matusky covers it perfectly in a larger piece in his Gregarious blog: (his words)

Penn State, like many colleges and universities, has become the ultimate bubble. Where football trumps education. Where binge drinking is celebrated and institutionalized. Where on any given fall Saturday, 100,000 people engage in a false culture of alcohol-fueled friends and good times. It’s where the 84-year-old head coach, who isn’t really coaching, has that fact covered up by assistants. Where students are encouraged to mortgage their futures by taking on mountains of debt. Where too many families part with their lives’ savings to fund educations that employers don’t want, while jobs in engineering and the sciences go begging.

It’s where tuition dollars fund climbing walls. Where free laundry service has more promotional value than a new physics lab. And it’s where  uality is set by a ranking in U.S. News & World Report. In this alternate reality, is it any wonder that a coach, an athletic director, a college president could overlook child abuse to protect one of their own? Two years ago, Chicago Public Radio’s “This American Life” ran a horrifying piece about Penn State and its love of alcohol and abhorrent behavior. When I told my Penn State friends about it, they denied all of it. When now-disgraced former Penn State President Graham Spanier came to power, it was as a reformer. But he soon caved to alumni and  hometown pressure to keep the wine flowing. The party going. In the “This American Life” segment, Spanier almost sounds proud that PSU was named the top party school in America.

Need further proof of just how far colleges have distorted our perceptions? Google “the best college in America.” You get thousands of hits by schools identifying themselves as the best. Google “the worst schools in America,” and you find few lists or reporting. Clearly marketers have swamped objective reporting and commenting when it comes to reviewing colleges and universities. In their world, they are all the best.

But long before Greg’s piece was Peter Thiel who has railed against the Higher Education Bubble for some time now, for reasons outside of sport. But if you tie together his arguments with Greg’s, it becomes more clear.

 …for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.

Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Thiel talks about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. Similarly, the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life.  It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.

This bubble was fueled by sport and its spectacle. More specifically, football.

Joe Paterno was the golden goose (some estimate he raised $1,000,000,000 of revenue for PSU in his time there). He spent 60 years doing what was right. He brought dollars to campus, hope to aspiring athletes and their hope-fully promoted coaches, and unfortunately, through an assistant coach to whom he was too loyal, brought young boys into the care of moral monsters. That the whole PSU system was unable to summon the courage to do what must be done- instead of simply what was simply right- is a tragedy.

It may well change higher education forever. It saddens me that so much had to be abused, from young men to good names to hope itself- before real action is taken. I mourn the victims.

Søren Kierkegaard said: Life can only be understood looking backward, but it must be lived going forward.

Miles Sharpless Spencer with 24th kid, Byrdie

Back in the day, commoners would from time to time approach the lord of the manor and “claim kin”, hoping to reap some of the benefits of those that lived “inside the walls”. Needless to say, those living inside the walls were very comfy and pretty skeptical. It usually took very good data, a lot of money, or a big @#$% army to convince people you were legit. For example William the Conqueror started out as William the Bastard, until he set matters straight in 1066 at the point of a spear.

These days we can prove more with data.

First is the growing power of ancestral research because of the web (and the Mormons, thanks for the hard work!). I’ve spent some time on Ancestry.com in the past year poking around my family history. We have a lot of legends that have been passed down through the years, but not a lot of it based on verifiable facts. Thanks to web 2.0, I have now traced Spencer males back to 1728 with birth and death records, census data, and Sons of the American Revolution documents and guess what: the family actually did a good job of remembering the lineage without writing much of it down. My great grandfather did have 24 kids. He did have his last when he was 74 years old. And he did have a wife ~40 years his junior. Apparently, with his spare time he ran a farm in Central Pennsylvania. His great grandfather a Joseph Sr. may have fought for the winners in the Revolutionary War (still confirming). And his ancestors came from England. (More to come after the DNA is complete).

Second is the power of  social networks to access additional, related facts nearly instantaneously. My dad, aka Big Art, and I had spent the previous 5+ years trying to piece together rumors, family legends, a bit of travel to the continent in an effort to verify anything about our heritage. The we logged on to Ancestry and used the other trees to quickly piece together draft documents, immigration papers, and baptism records we had not otherwise found. suddenly, our knowledge was no longer in a silo.

Third is the burgeoning business of DNA. 23andME  tipped off a fascinating journey in mapping the human genome. With the simple swab of a cheek, I will be able to confirm not only who we are related to, but also what anomalies I may be exposed to. Sergey Brin of Google realized he prone to Parkinsons by mapping his DNA this way. I can’t imagine what I am prone to. But with the results, there is likely undeniable truth to my ancestral claims, whatever that might be.

But perhaps the biggest point for me is this: like it or not, we eventually become our fathers, more or less. That is perhaps why I have been so fascinated with the Visualize Health/SelfAwareness project, where connected devices inform us of the health and wellness trends of ourselves and our loved ones. Through the power of Web 2.0, Social networks, and DNA we can all know what our baseline data is, as well as the trend. It’s up to us where to go with it.

To laugh often and much...

Here’s a recent shot from an event I attended with my Dad, aka Big Art.  OK, it was my wedding.

He was dapper in his tux, danced like a dervish, and sported a head of hair anyone half his age would envy. And while a full house went silent listening to him recite his “favorite” Emerson from 72 years ago, very few that night knew the challenges my father overcame to get there, many of them health related. Honestly, their gravity cannot be overstated.

So, looking at this picture of us side by side (after that toast), I got to thinking something we all wonder about as time goes by. “What will I be like when…”

Could I visualize that progression? And if there are improvements I want to make along the way and goals that I want to prioritize, what am I doing now that will affect that?

And so, a concept being kicked around by a few different entrepreneurs began to crystallize for me. Millions have created avatars for Farmville, Mob Wars, and World of Warfare. Many medical professionals who want to do something better than battle insurance carriers for reimbursements. And the number of mobile devices measuring weight, Blood pressure, Blood sugar, heart rate, excercise, etc. are making automated personal health monitoring a possibility. Then there are social networks to provide the support necessary to keep us on track with our goals.

So…how about a social game that helps me Visualize My Health?

Maybe then we can see our real-life avatar progress as it incorporates the positive (or negative) benefits of our (intended) behavior. And we can course correct those behaviors along the way. Drink less (or more!): add 3 years. Quit cigarettes?: add 5 years! Exercise: see your avatar lose weight and look healthier. Eliminate stress: live forever, or at least long enough to dance at your son’s second wedding! I’ve seen some entrepreneurs peck around at this, but no one is hitting it right — yet.

My call to action?  More feedback on the idea. Is this about health first? Is this another social media game to play online, or on my smartphone?  Is America long on health aspirations, and short on goals and willpower (shout out to Covey’s Seven Habits #2- begin with the End in Mind) ? Love to hear your thoughts and recommendations below.

release the stick!

I’ve made another breakthrough identification of key interlocking components of the cosmos: rapeseed.

I was in the back of a cab hurtling through the English countryside with my Pop, my friend Greg and his dad, Paul. We were headed to Duxford AFB, the center of the world for restored WWI and WWII military aircraft, and a pre-arranged dogfight in Stearlings and Tiger Moths between the Matusky’s and the Spencer’s. It was near the beginning of our Two Fathers/Two Sons/Two Wars trip and we were all just finding our way along to a new friendship. Paul is incredibly inquisitive, and always wants to get the answer right, and the source, if possible. My Dad is more of a “no Sh*t” kind of student- anything new he learns automatically gets that response, followed by a deep belly laugh.

What’s that yellow flower in the fields, I asked. English cabbies are never without an answer, and this one did not disappoint. Rapeseed he answered. Rapeseed. Wonder what in the world that is. Dad gave his standard two word response and moved on. Paul let it go, too excited about the prospect of getting up in the planes. But I kept thinking about it, like it was familiar in some way.

It was a beauty of a May morning, with a high sky and just enough clouds to cast some shadows and depth across the fields of alternating green and yellow. I had seen seeing that similar contrast for years, taking the train from Waterloo through Normandy to Paris, or riding out to see the Spencer family seat in Northamptionshire as Dad and I had done the day before. Deep green patches broken up by vibrant yellow flower, almost the color of dandelions but taller and imminently more appealing. It always made a train ride more beautiful: there is nothing quite like it in the states, neither trains nor flora. But from a plane, that something totally different. I was about to see it all laid out in front of me in a patchwork of green and yellow from the open cockpit of a 1918 Tiger Moth I was flying. Funny thing, the Tiger Moth was actually the same color as the rapeseed.

did not know that...

As I maneuvered the Tiger through a few swooping bank turns, I tried to absorb what a beautiful moment I was experiencing. The Tiger flew like a feather- a noisy feather, but a feather nonetheless. The English countryside, with field after field of rapeseed and wheat was as gorgeous as I have ever seen it. Gorgeous as I’ve seen anything, matter of fact. I watched the shadow of our plane tracing the line from green to yellow to green again until- oops, too much watching our shadow and my co-pilot yanked the stick bank from me. So i went on enjoying the view, thinking myself a bit like The English Patient or Dennis Finch Hatton from Out of Africa, both famous Tiger Moth flyers. (Well, the fact they both crashed Tiger Moths reinforces the good judgment of surrendering the stick to steadier hands while one daydreams).

A month later, I am back in my kitchen cooking up a storm when I reach for my trusted canola bottle, an oil I have favored for years because it does not smoke at high temperatures. It’s really great because it is light, it cooks great, it doesn’t over power in a dressing. It’s the go-to oil in my lineup for most daily cooking chores. And I notice for the first time the label on the front of the bottle like someone is talking to me…

“In most countries, canola is also known as rapeseed oil”.
No sh*t.