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The Best Page In The Universe is a personal humorous website created by a university student [1] (http://www.poindexteronline.com/text/archives/00000078.html) named George Ouzounian, nicknamed Maddox.
The website became notorious because of its profane manner of parodying anyone and everyone that Maddox deems unworthy (literally everyone and everybody, except maybe pirates, lumberjacks, and himself). Nothing is sacred; nobody is spared. Even his fans are fodder for his egotistical rants. The popularity of the website may also be attributed to Maddox's non-partisan nature, simply being anti-establishment, anti-fad, anti-cool, and basically anti-anything and everything. Maddox presents statistics that show he has more visitors to his site than McDonald's, Pepsi and other large corporations, even though he spends no money whatsoever on advertising.
Maddox
Source: Official FAQ (http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=faq)
Maddox claims to receive lots of email and work for a telemarketing company writing programs in Informix 4GL/SQL, Perl (CGI), C, C++, Unix shell (Korn shell, Bourne shell, Bash), Sed/Awk, Java and PHP.
Maddox describes himself as a 26 year-old mathematics student at the University of Utah. He says he works 40-60 hours per week. His website is made using vi and Unix. He claims to have had 79 marriage proposals from women and 4 from men. Part of his "shtick" is self-aggrandizing statements such as, "I'm The Center of the Universe," "I'm better than everyone," "I love me," "Oh man I rule" "I AM KING," etc. (see [2] (http://maddox.xmission.com/imbest.html)).
Maddox can sometimes be found on the IRC network, Whatnet.org (irc.whatnet.org) in the channel #maddox.
Quotes from Maddox are available from Wikiquote [3] (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Maddox).
The website
The homepage of the website proclaims itself "The Best Page In The Universe." The format is a weblog. The visitor is advised: "If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong." The page also has a Che Guevara-like image of the author on it, wearing an eye patch and a skull and cross bones on his beret. Maddox often proclaims himself to be a pirate, and draws himself as such in some of his entries. When asked about the Che Guevara image, and if Maddox was a socialist, he responded, "No, I'm not a socialist/marxist/communist. I'm using the Che picture because I think it's a good parody of a recognizable icon, and because most people consider him 'Che the revolutionary,' not 'Che the pinko.'" Also, in earlier versions of his site, Maddox included a "Say NO to Communism" sign (probably as a parody of "Just Say No to Drugs" signs).
Maddox explains how he started the site: He wrote a text document listing 50 things that made him angry. He gave the list to several people on Efnet's #coders. Their response was positive, so he started the controversial website in 1997. It was created partly in response to Real Ultimate Power.
A section of the website, titled Commujism (a satirical, humorous misspelling of Communism), contains drawings of a pornographic and satirical nature. One of them is a parody of the numerous "Enlarge your penis" advertisements, so common on commercial pornographic websites.
Other controversial drawings on his website include cows being eaten, hippies being killed, and similar images intended to shock the viewer. 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. Sections of the website contain "hate mail" he has received, along with his caustic responses. Several pages humorously criticize vegetarianism and animal rights. Maddox sent tampons and baby shampoo to Bill O'Reilly as a way of criticizing his talk show and his book, The No Spin Zone. [4] (http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=bill_oreilly)
The layout of the website is simple; as he notes, "like Google." The author says that it thus saves his host Internet service provider, in bandwidth costs since it is such a popular site. In addition, the simple layout is there to protest to "flashy" sites that he says have little content.
He reports that Etisalat, the sole United Arab Emirates telecommunications carrier has banned his site. He also reports that some fire walls come pre-packaged with his site blocked and listed as militant / extremist. He also banned access to his site from the domain of Websense, an Internet filter provider, in retaliation for adding his site to their block list.
Maddox gave his website his own web award: Best Damn Webpage in the Universe.
The webpage contains an online store which sells stickers and t-shirts with controversial messages such as "For every animal you don't eat, I'm going to eat three".
About his items, his site states, "Most online stores sell shirts for around $17-$20 (plus shipping), so I'm clearly not milking you for these items, and frankly you're not doing me a favor by buying them. Everything on this site kicks ass, and if the shirts don't sell, I'll wear them all myself. I'm doing you a favor by selling them."
April Fools 2004
On April 1, 2004, the site was changed around as part of an April Fools 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 newbies on the Internet. Many visitors thought that the joke was legitimate, that Maddox had either 'turned into a hippy' or his site had been hacked, emailing him and complaining. In response, he put an entry onto 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, and he said that "I seriously contemplated taking down my site and just posting links to animal porn for you retards." [5] (http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=april_fools_you_morons)
Mothers against Maddox
There is a website called Mothers against Maddox [6] (http://www.geocities.com/mothersagainstmaddox) (running on a Geocities account, though a mirror maintained by Maddox is here: [7] (http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/mam/)) created by Beth Robbins, who made an Internet petition (now removed) to shut down the site. When Maddox placed a link to that site on his website, Mothers against Maddox inundated with visitors and repeatedly exceeded its bandwidth limit. Internet petitions are criticized because some people are able to sign them numerous times, and Internet petitions aren't taken seriously by many people.
A popular theory is that Maddox himself created MAM. No evidence has shown this to be the case thus far. This theory has possibly been caused by Maddox mirroring the website to thebestpageintheuniverse.com, an alias to The Best Page of the Universe, to prevent the real site from going down due to lack of bandwidth. However, the real page has sometimes been spotted actually working when its bandwidth wasn't clogged up thanks to Maddox linking to it.
The Best Book in the Universe
Maddox is currently writing a book, which is due out in late 2005, and a comic book.
External links
Maddox Fansites
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