The Best Page in the Universe

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File:Maddox.PNG

Screen shot circa February 2006

The Best Page in the Universe is a personal satiric humor website created by self-proclaimed pirate George Ouzounian, better known as Maddox, from Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.

The site originated from a text document he wrote listing 50 things that made him angry. He gave the list to several people on EFnet's #coders. The response was positive, and he started the controversial website in 1997.

As the title suggests, the website proclaims itself to be "The Best Page In The Universe", a name stemming from an old Yahoo! policy that blocked sites with the word "best" in the title from inclusion in their search engine. In protest, Maddox claimed the site to be the best in the universe and named it accordingly. He makes note of this in one entry, adding that a search for The Best Page In The Universe using Yahoo now shows his page at the top of the list, despite Yahoo's original refusal to list the site for the aforementioned reason. The site's format could be considered that of a weblog, although Maddox himself has decried blogs in this article and this article and disagrees with the characterization.

The page is headed with a Che Guevara-like image of the author, wearing an eye patch and a skull and cross bones on his beret. Maddox uses this image as a parody of a revolutionary icon, and does not proclaim himself to be a socialist or communist. However, he often proclaims himself to be a pirate, and draws himself as such in his articles.

The website's layout is simple and minimalized in order to save on bandwidth costs as well as to protest against websites with little content that focus on aesthetics. It uses large text in light colors on a black background, which is explained in the FAQ page, stating that black text on a white background is like staring at a lightbulb. All the code on the site is written by hand in vi, since "anything else is for failures."

Maddox also has an online store which sells merchandise such as stickers and t-shirts with controversial messages such as "For every animal you don't eat, I'm going to eat three" and "Littering kicks ass."

News is also posted at infrequent intervals. The pieces range from major things such as the announcements of Maddox's book, comic, and illustrators, to smaller things such as responding to people's requests.

Articles

The articles as a whole have slowly evolved throughout the years. Early articles (around 1998 or so) were short and posted frequently (every week or so). As updates became less frequent, the articles have become much longer in length. Newer articles also include media such as sound clips and add-on pages to enhance his point. Some recent articles have also been translated, such as the Sideways (Italian translation) article.

Maddox often adds images in his articles to illustrate a point. Controversial drawings on his website include cows eating his testicles, hippies being killed, elderly people being fired into the sun, and similar images. Maddox claims that he draws most of the controversial pictures himself using Microsoft Paint and occasionally Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and other graphics manipulation software.

Updates to his site have become so infrequent due to his other projects that their non-appearance has become an on-going joke. He recently launched a competition for people to send him cartoons about himself or his website, most of which are attacks on his largely adolescent male fanbase who continually harass him via e-mail for new articles. Entries so far include a depiction of Maddox leaping out of a computer monitor and smashing two fans' faces together, and a cartoon of one boy who checks the site for new content only to find a cartoon of himself that he had posted 10 seconds earlier, et cetera. However, despite initial weekly updates this part of the site has not been updated consistently either. Maddox explicitly promised new site content would be available on February 8, 2006 and then failed to deliver any (Maddox was "working out bugs" in the entry, which involved an interactive survey). This sparked an increasing amount of anger, disillusionment and disappointment among his fans. However, the update was subsequently delivered the next day.

April Fool's Days

On April 1, 2004, the site was changed around as part of an April Fool's joke. The title of the page was changed to "One of the Better Pages in the Universe", and the new image showed the author superimposed on Mr. Clean. The caption was changed to "this page is about my opinions. if you disagree, you have a right to your opinion and I can respect that." The background of the page changed from black to white. He made a new series of articles parodying the posts that have come to represent the majority of blogs.

Many visitors thought that the joke was legitimate, that Maddox had either "turned into a hippy", his site had been hacked or someone accessed his computer while he was away. Maddox says that he received over 2000 emails over the April Fool's joke. In response, he authored a retort on his site, saying that he had lost all respect for people who visit his site due to their inability to realize a joke when they see one: "I seriously contemplated taking down my site and just posting links to animal porn for you retards."

On April 1, 2005, the site was changed again, this time as a parody of a Terri Schiavo support blog. It was made to resemble a poorly designed Xanga page, with satirical comments by fake users, and a photo of Ashley Olsen as a user picture - a micro-rant in itself, as a comment similar in content to the 'normal' Maddox had been posted.

Hidden pages

Maddox's website is also known to contain several "hidden pages," many of which are unfinished works or first drafts of articles that were moved around. There is a list of known "hidden pages" available at The Best Fan Page in the Universe

About Maddox

George Ouzounian, born in 1978 in Salt Lake City Utah, is the creator of the website The Best Page in the Universe. He is of Armenian descent, and has a younger brother. He took the pseudonym from an old cartoon called "Madox 01" as evidenced by this interview.

Education

He grew up in Woods Cross, Utah, attending Woods Cross High School, and later the University of Utah with Mathematics as his major. In addition to English, he also speaks Armenian fluently and is currently learning Mandarin Chinese. In the future, he would like to work in Bermuda, Hong Kong or Thailand, and eventually work toward another degree or a masters.

He is familiar with several programming languages, including: Informix 4GL/SQL, Perl, C/C++, sed/awk, Unix shell (korn, bourne, bash), Pascal and PHP.

Career and work

Despite his professed hatred toward it, he currently lives in Utah, and until 2004, was a programmer for a telemarketing company working from 40 to 55 hours a week.

Ouzounian's primary focus began with his very popular website which now also serves as a launching pad for his various other projects. On August 11, 2004, he announced the production of a comic, although nothing has been published as of yet. On February 22, 2005, he announced that he was writing a book, to be published in June 2006 by Kensington Books. On October 18, 2005, he revealed through his mailing list that the book will be titled The Alphabet of Manliness, and will be 204 pages long. On January 19, 2006, he announced on his website that the book has been finished.

On June 17, 2005, he invited videogame programmers to "make a game that doesn't suck." Ouzounian posted a flash video (which originated as a YTMND) on his website depicting what the game might include. The video shows, among other things, a pirate running over elderly people and children, attacking zombies, kicking a dog over a fence, using beef jerky to heal himself, a lesbian scene, and an exploding dinosaur. As stated on his website, he wants a game "where the main character murders feminists with his giant boner, lesbian centaurs get their backs broken with sledge hammers, elderly people get body slammed into cactuses, and emo dumbasses get prostate examinations with the business end of my shoe."

Interests

Ouzounian has discussed his musical preferences in several interviews. On his website, he has mentioned few artists which he listens to. In terms of the discussion of music on his website, he prominently discusses/lists music he dislikes. Throughout the site, however, he mentions liking the bands Pantera and Sepultura. In addition, during an interview, Maddox mentioned his favorite musician to be Towa Tei "because the third hand is just badass". He also lists Dmitri Shostakovich as one of his favorite composers. He has also stated that Steven Wright is his favorite comedian in this interview. According to a hidden page on his site, some of Maddox's favorite movies include Ghostbusters, Army of Darkness, and Big Trouble in Little China. Half-Life, Contra 3 and Ikaruga are among his favorite video games.

Internet popularity

The website is notorious for its profane manner of satirizing anyone and everyone whom its author deems unworthy. Even Maddox's fans from time to time become the object of his egotistical rants. Sometimes his rants are about society itself, but often he talks about recent items of interest, such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' Hot Coffee mod , and the films Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of The Sith and Sideways . His articles are often quoted as a voice of satire or truth. As of March 2006 the website has an Alexa rank of 5,886.

The popularity of the website is attributable to many things. He writes anti-establishment, non-partisan diatribes, dissociating with any party or philosophy. For example, he calls both Republicans and Democrats "dirty bastards" , and tires of being labelled a liberal or conservative . On the website itself, the page is simple, with large font on a black background, and has no ads or popups at all, a rarity in a place where both are the norm on high-traffic websites.

Both his rants on society and recent events and his website as a whole have made it an enormous hit. On August 18, 2003, he said that "The Best Page" receives more visitors than McDonald's, Pepsi, and other large corporations, even though he has spent nothing on advertising or promotion . (It must be noted that the main products of these corporations are not web-based, and that Maddox's claim is something of a fallacy: the money spent by McDonalds, etc on advertising is not to draw people to their company websites.) On March 18, 2005, the site reached its 100,000,000th hit , and has many people visiting the site at any given time.

The large following that Maddox commands has led to some major Internet backlashes. In March 2005, Maddox slammed Orbitz.com for "selling me an impossible itinerary," causing rifts in the online travel booking industry. The article and backlash against Orbitz prompted many online travel corporations to offer solutions and customer service lines to rectify mistakes in itineraries. In other incidents, merely posting a link has led to his fans flooding the link: the Mothers Against Maddox petition was flooded after Maddox posted it; likewise, when a radio DJ stole from his Cameron Diaz rant , Maddox reported that the radio station got flooded with thousands of visitors, callers and people emailing them to call them on the plagiarism.

Maddox is also an Internet celebrity. In a response to an email that accused him of "hid behind computer," he boasted, "I get recognized in public all the time, don't you think that if I was afraid that I wouldn't post my badass pirate picture on the internet for millions to see?"

Criticism

He is accused on his hatemail pages of not actually arguing the points the detractors make, but simply distracting the reader with visual aids and insulting the detractor; however his defenders would argue that this is intentional, and the main criticism he is making of his detractors is that they care.

Maddox is also frequently criticized for not updating frequently. He has responded to this criticism by posting a news update titled Foreplay on May 24, 2004, and a special request on February 12, 2005. Small updates are sometimes posted on the front page: an update on August 22, 2005 tells visitors, "Updates coming soon, I have work, get off my nuts."

Due to the nature of his rants, some of his fans occasionally come to criticize him for attacking their favorite thing. He calls these people his "ex-biggest fans" and says he has received "one email like this per week about every single one of my posts since 1998."

Blocking

Due to the controversial content, four countries and some internet filtering products have banned his website. On January 8,2004, the United Arab Emirates was the first country to ban his website . On September 11, 2005, the site was banned in both Saudi Arabia and Qatar. His site is also banned in Myanmar. Maddox wrote the Websense article in which he described being filtered and banned on several services, such as Websense, Lexmark, and the Department of Defense. In addition, several cities have banned access to his site on public access computers, such as Sydney, Australia.

Politics

Certain message boards have had heated discussions about Maddox and the political power he might wield with the seemingly large number of young followers that he can influence. A recent outburst was shown when a MAM (Mothers against Maddox) poll was opened; immediately, thousands and thousands of pro-Maddox readers started posting rather vulgar comments on the poll, entirely destroying it.

As noted above, Maddox has not declared support for any political party, and has professed active dislike for the Republican and Democratic parties on numerous occasions. He himself has championed a 'Regressive' party platform (sarcastically) and notes on his page counter that he cannot run for President until 2016.

Mothers Against Maddox

Beth Robbins, a mother, formed Mothers Against Maddox. Her slogan was, "Help us Fight and Finally Shut Down the Most Hateful site on the Internet." She also created a petition to get the site shut down. When Maddox wrote about it in his Websense article and posted a link to the original Geocities site, Mothers Against Maddox was inundated with visitors and repeatedly exceeded its bandwidth limit, so Maddox hosted a mirror . The Internet petition Robbins set up was ridiculed because it is unregulated; people can sign numerous times, and on PetitionOnline, signs cannot be removed or edited. After Maddox posted the petition link, the MAM petition shot up to the Top 10 Active Petitions, with Maddox fans flooding the petition and posting extremely vulgar comments. The petition was eventually deactivated.

A popular theory is that Maddox himself created Mothers Against Maddox. No evidence has shown this to be true. Supporters of this theory claim that some of Maddox's writing style is apparent in some of the pages, and that the site contains links to MAVAV.org, a hoax page set up to mock parents in favor of video game censorship. This theory is based on the assumption that Maddox mirrored the website to thebestpageintheuniverse.com, an alias to "The Best Page in the Universe", to prevent the real site from going down due to lack of bandwidth. The real page has sometimes been spotted working when its bandwidth wasn't clogged up. Additionally, some people have also emailed Beth Robbins and received replies.

Something Awful

Maddox has a long-standing feud with Something Awful webmaster Richard Kyanka and many of the site's thousands of forum members. After a falling-out with the site's administrators, Maddox berated Something Awful as being too capitalist (since it costs $9.95 to register on their message boards). Detractors point out that Maddox sells merchandise from his website. Unlike Something Awful, Maddox does not require payment to use any part of his site. Maddox states on his online store that "You're not doing me a favor by buying this stuff. I'm doing you a favor by selling it."

Maddox registered a Something Awful forums account, and posted two contributions in a thread dedicated to turning Windows backgrounds into video games. He then responded to criticism about his articles in another thread, as well as criticising Something Awful in return and attracting negative attention from the administrators. He later posted a thread containing a link to a parody of the Something Awful front page , and was then banned.

Something Awful has struck back against Maddox a few times, mocking his alleged elitism and his style of writing .

During an Attack of the Show interview, Something Awful writer, "Dr." David Thorpe, facetiously claimed " steal most of content from a guy named Maddox." Throughout the whole interview he seemed to have a negative attitude towards the host's softball questions.

The interview can be found here.

Imitations

During the nine years that it has been online, "The Best Page in the Universe" has gained a significant cult following and has spawned many imitation pages. Generally, these "knock-off" websites can be placed in one of three different categories:

Parodies which publicly assert Maddox has influenced their website; many of these even proudly imitate Maddox's style of writing, artwork, logos, and trademark color scheme.
Satire websites which claim their writing has not been affected by Maddox.
Thieving websites which copy the exact content of articles written by Maddox.

Charity

On September 4, 2005 Maddox opened a charity fund for Hurricane Katrina storm victims. The fund donated 50% of the profit he procured from his online store to the Red Cross. On September 26, 2005, he posted the results, donating $3,068.

The Alphabet of Manliness

This is the title of Maddox's first novel, which will be released later this year, for more information,

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