An Insider’s Notes On The Shabby Death Of The Seattle SuperSonics

I usually arrived at work before most of the staff. On some days, I could wander across the office to get my coffee without seeing anyone. But strangely, that morning, the team’s communications guru, was already there. He pulled me aside. “Be prepared to have a terrible day,” he said. “I can’t tell you any more—you’ll know soon enough. But I’m telling you as a friend, this is going to be a really rough day.”

I went back to my desk trying to decipher what he meant. Soon, my phone rang. On the other end was a member of the operations team: “Jeremy, you need to do something for me. You need to grab the championship trophies. Polish them until they’re spotless and bring them to the Furtado Center [the team’s training facility]. I can’t tell you why, you just need to do it now.”

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Maria Bamford interview: A conversation about mental illness and stand-up comedy.

Bamford: No, no, it was my idea. I was terrified, because it was this motorcycle club in Duluth—a pretty low-key motorcycle club, because Minnesotans aren’t too rowdy, but I was scared. So I was like, “Dad, would you please open for me?” And my dad loves me, and so he worked out his bits.

Slate: It was all his own material.

Bamford: Yeah. I think it was about six to seven minutes. He bombed and then I bombed. It was a family affair.

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Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz Challenges the Web to Take Down His Site | Site Reference – Internet Marketing Articles

According to Google’s original guidelines, it said…

“Can competitors harm ranking? There’s nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

In November, Google changed its tune a little bit…

“Can competitors harm ranking? There’s ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

Did anyone catch the slight difference in this new entry? You don’t have to be a professional writer to see this one.

Then, on March 14th…

“Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

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