Sometimes when I can’t settle on one single thought/topic for a column, I just throw a bunch of stuff together and see what pops out.  What follows is this week’s worth:

I’m still in the dark over why so many Carolina fans, still flush from winning the national championship, are now ragging on Tony Bradley and (until he declared he was coming back) Theo Pinson for opting to participate in the pro basketball draft.  The system is designed for these kids – up to a point – to decline and return to college with no repercussions.

This is the model I’ve used since the day I stopped crying over James Worthy and later Michael Jordan leaving Chapel Hill early.

If the CEO of your dream job observed your work and came to you and said come check our company out for a couple days and we’ll tell you what you need to do to position yourself later to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year when you eventually join with us – and who knows!?! – after you find out what we can show you, you just might make even more money.

Go ahead, think about that for a second or two and tell me you mean you wouldn’t at least go and find out about it?  I mean, someone’s giving this to you, and you don’t want to give yourself a choice!?!

This may not ease the pain of losing a great talent (think how the poor coach feels), but I hope this gives you something to reflect upon.

Meanwhile, I know this has been a tough week for our 45th President, but enough with the media criticism, people.

A few of my highly respected conservative friends have recently posted negative comments about the press, some of which they’ve even held up to being attributed to great American satirists and humorists like Mark Twain and Will Rogers.

OK, people, I certainly understand your point and position.  However, neither Mr. Twain, nor Mr. Rogers, nor others from past centuries could ever know – and only imagine – about such media phenomena we have today like the Internet, Facebook Live, and Twitter.

The difference in 2017 is that we have ample (and frequent) examples of actual, live public statements made by people in high political office.  Talk about piling on, Mr. Trump, did you ever wonder what poor Mr. Lincoln went through with his plethora of incompetent military strategists, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the wildly unpopular first-ever conscription draft?  And can you believe he did this all in the name of trying to preserve the Union!?!

All through the campaign Trump was never afraid to double-down on things like the Border Wall and who’d pay for it, or whether his then-opponent should’ve been locked up by the man he claims botched the whole affair, and whose very ineffectiveness he called into question right before he fired him.

Denials of such statements now that he occupies the Oval Office constitute troubling patterns of dishonesty and continual slaps in the faces of intelligent citizens able to make up their own minds.  Media coverage of such utterances aren’t “misunderstandings”, “alternative facts”, or even (my favorite) “fake news”.  Such assumptions are pathetic and insulting.

In our modern nation, plentiful, clear, and direct evidence is simply there for all to see and hear. And, just for the record, I’m a big fan of both Will Rogers and Mark Twain; but I wouldn’t dare compare these two national treasures to Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert.

Gene Motley is a Staff Writer at Roanoke-Chowan Publications. Contact him at gene.motley@r-cnews.com or 252-332-7211.