The Best Page in the Universe: Difference between revisions

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The top banner for maddox.xmission.net

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

The website became notorious because of 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. The popularity of the website may also be attributable to his anti-establishment, non-partisan diatribes (for example, saying that both Republicans and Democrats are "dirty bastards" [1]). He presents statistics that show "The Best Page" receives more visitors than McDonald's, Pepsi, and other large corporations, even though he has never spent money or time promoting the site [2]. The immense popularity of the site, which on March 18, 2005 saw its 100,000,000th visit, has enabled Maddox to expand his efforts into other media. He is currently writing a book that is due out in March 2006 from Kensington Books [3].

Maddox

Source: Official FAQ

Maddox is a twentysomething year old former employee of 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 where he claims he used to work 40 to 60 hours per week. Although he quit the job, he has no plans to go back "to the corporate world," as he said in his chat room (see below). His website is made using vi in Unix.

Maddox is of Armenian descent, as confirmed in a post questioning his status with the people of Armenia.

He has also spawned a dozen or so rip off sites such as Thilo the ninja pirate, who can be seen through this link. http://www.ninjapirate.com

The website

The website proclaims itself to be "The Best Page In The Universe." The format is that of a weblog and the visitor is warned: "This page is about me and why everything I like is great. 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 his entries. When asked about the Che Guevara image, and if he is a socialist, Maddox 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'." In earlier versions of his site, Maddox included a "Say NO to Communism" graphic, parodying the "Just Say No to Drugs" symbol.

When asked about how the site was created, Maddox explains he wrote a text document listing 50 things that made him angry. He gave the list to several people on Efnet's #coders. The response was positive, so he started the controversial website in 1997.

A section of the website titled Commujism (a satirical misspelling of Communism) contains pornographic and satirical illustrations.

Other controversial drawings on his website include cows being eaten, hippies being killed, old people being fired into the sun, 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.

The layout of the website is simple; as he notes, "like Google." The author says that the simple layout saves bandwidth costs due to the website's popularity. In addition, Maddox believes the simple layout serves as a protest of "flashy" sites he claims have little content.

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."

It is also possible to buy hoodies in the online store.

A recent article posted by Maddox, slamming Orbitz.com for "selling me an impossible itinerary," caused rifts in the online travel booking industry, prompting many online travel corporations to offer solutions and customer service lines to rectify mistakes in itineraries.

April Fool's

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 vapid 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" 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." [4]

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. It could have also been considered a micro-rant, considering a maddox-like comment has been posted (the term "posted" is to be used lightly, as there was no ability to post new comments).

Lou images (NSFW)

The Lou images are shock images that Ouzounian uses to joke around with his friends and to shock his enemies. Some IP addresses who are banned from his site are redirected to the Lou images. The higher the "number", the more offensive Maddox perceives the picture to be. He states that he hasn't found a suitable "Lou2" yet.

• lou1.jpg: A fat woman struggling to put her trousers on. The zipper to the trousers is not zipped all of the way up.
• lou3.jpg: A man wearing a thong bikini.
• lou4.jpg: An old man wearing plastic pants with an erection.
• lou5.jpg: A man looking at another man wearing women's underwear.
• lou6.jpg: A man wearing boxers with an erection.
• lou7.jpg: The Lemonparty image, featuring a triumvirate of elderly men, one of whom is performing oral sex on the second while a third is kissing the fellatee. Ouzounian states that he originally found the picture as "tribute_to_911_wtc_disaster.jpg".
• lou8.jpg: A man ejaculating into a woman's eye. The following string of text is to the right of the picture:
  

That's for real - cum right on the eye!
Mona loves it - and cum facials - and fucking her fans!
Wanna see cum on her face?
Click here!

• lou9.jpg: A picture of a man digitally altered so that the man appears to have a large penis. There are orange spots in the testicles and penis.
• lou10.jpg: A picture of a man with a vagina.
• lou11.jpg: A picture of a fat old woman exposing her genitals.
• lou12.jpg: A picture of a naked man sitting on a couch.
• lou13.jpg: A picture of a black man digitally altered so that the man appears to have a large penis.

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 PetitionOnline 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. Maddox hosted a mirror [5]. The Internet petition Robbins set up was ridiculed because it is possible for some to sign it numerous times. 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 removed.

A popular theory is that Maddox himself created MAM. No evidence has shown this to be the case thus far, although some users claim that some of Maddox's writing style is apparent in some of the pages. Further, it contains links to MAVAV.org, a hoax page set up to mock parents in favor of video game censorship. This theory has possibly been caused by Maddox mirroring 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. However, the real page has sometimes been spotted actually working when its bandwidth wasn't clogged up. Some people have also emailed Beth Robbins and gotten responses in return.

Comments on Suicide

Suicide has been a recurring theme as a joke on his page. A more recent article listed and rated various methods of "Manly Suicide". Examples of these include eating a bathtub full of baked beans, headbutting the sidewalk and the classic "Cadbury Suprise".

Another suicide article featured was a list of possible events where he suggested you should commit suicide afterwards.

The summarized events are listed below:

1. Your parents are always making you clean your room and do your homework?
2. If you just got out of a bad relationship, at least your ex will feel guilty for a couple of minutes
3. Put the prozac away, what you need is rat poison.
4. Drop a plate of food in a restaurant?
5. Flunked out of college + Don't know algebra = Time for you-know-what.
6. Do you really want to sit in traffic for another half hour?
7. It's easier to hang yourself than to get rid of a telemarketer
8. You realize that there's no cure for the flu
9. Flat tire?
10. College application get rejected? Take the hint.

In all of these articles, responses via email were very common. Hate-mail, as with everything else Maddox writes, poured in regarding these articles. For him, they were just run-of-the-mill messages he receives daily, but in addition he received thank you letters from people who claimed to have contemplated or attempted suicide but were saved by reading his comedy and encouraged him to continue, uncensored.

External links

• The Best Page in the Universe
• Alternate URLs: [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13]
• April Fools Page 04
• April Fools Page 05
• Maddox comic
• Commujism (Older version: Commujism)
• Maddox Book Information
• Maddox Halloween page
• Information about the UAE ban
• The Best Store in the Universe Alternate: [14]
• Mothers Against Maddox mirror
• Hidden Maddox - Large archive of hidden Maddox pages
• Hatemail - Hatemail Maddox has received along with comical responses
• Suicide Attempt Letters

Maddox fansites

• maddoxmania
• The Best Fanpage in the Universe
• Friends of Maddox
• Maddox Myspace
• The Hidden Maddox
• ninjapirate