The Best Page in the Universe
The Best Page in the Universe is a personal humor website created by self-proclaimed pirate George Ouzounian, better known as Maddox, from Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
About Maddox
George Ouzounian, born in 1978 (better known as Maddox), is the creator of the website The Best Page in the Universe. He is of Armenian descent and has a younger brother.
Education
He attended Woods Cross High School[1] in Woods Cross, Utah and later attended the University of Utah with Mathematics as his major. As well as English, he can speak 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 towards 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 towards it, he currently lives in Utah, and until 2004, was a programmer for a telemarketing company working from 40 to 60 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 yet been published. More recently, on February 22, 2005, he announced that he was writing a book, to be published in March 2006 by Kensington Books. On September 19, 2005, he said that the deadline for his book was at the end of the month. [2]
Interests
Maddox 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. [3] Throughout the site, however, he hints about liking the band Pantera. In addition, during an interview by GorrillaMask.com, Maddox mentioned his favorite band to be Towa Tei "because the third hand is just badass". [4]
The website
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". The format could be considered that of a weblog, although Maddox himself has decried blogs in a recent 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 minimalised in order to save on bandwidth costs as well as to protest against flashy websites with little content. It uses large text in light colors on a black background instead of the more widespread black text on a white background. As Maddox explains in his FAQ, 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 involve major things such as the announcements of Maddox's book, comic, and illustrators, to small 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 more sparse (Maddox said, "Since I'm no longer writing that book, updates should be more regular now." [5]), 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 being eaten, hippies being killed, elderly 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.
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 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. 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." [6]
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," found only by fans typing in random URLs. These pages are often 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
Internet popularity
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. Sometimes his rants are about society itself, but often times he talks about recent events, such as the Grand Theft Auto Hot Coffee mod [7], Revenge Of The Sith [8], or Sideways [9]. His articles are often quoted as a voice of satire or truth.
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 called both Republicans and Democrats "dirty bastards" [10], and has stated that he is tired of being labeled a liberal or conservative [11]. On the website itself, the page is simple, with a black background on large font (easy on the eyes) 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 [12]. On March 18, 2005, the site reached 100,000,000 hits [13], 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 [14], 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[ing] behind [his] computer," [15] 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
His site is not without its critics. 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.
Maddox is also frequently criticized for not updating frequently. He has responded to this criticism by posting a special request on February 12, 2005, and a news update titled Foreplay on May 24, 2004. 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, groups of fans occasionally become haters, criticizing him for hating their favorite thing. He calls these people his "biggest ex-fan" and says he has received "one email like this per week about every single one of my posts since 1998." The most recent ex-fans are some of those who liked Revenge of The Sith, which Maddox called a "steaming pile of Sith."
Blocking
Due to the controversial content, both countries and some internet filtering products have banned his website. On January 8,2004, the site was banned in the United Arab Emirates. On September 11, 2005, the site was banned in both Saudi Arabia and Qatar. On September 13, 2004, 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.
Politics
Certain message boards have had heated discussions about Maddox and the political power he might wield with him having seemly a lot of young followers that can be influenced. 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.
It is estimated that at least a million people or more read Maddox's site regularly; even if a fraction of those people agreed with Maddox's political ideas, he could affect political elections. Some have even suggested that, if he was to run for office, he could gain a significant following, either due to serious or satirical voters. Maddox himself has championed a Regressive party platform 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 [16]. 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. But the real page has sometimes been spotted actually 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 Rich 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 $9.99 to register on their message boards). Detractors point out that Maddox sell merchandise from his website and that Maddox also accepts donations from readers. But, 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."
Something Awful has struck back against Maddox a few times, ridiculing his alleged elitism and his style of writing [17].
Imitations
During the nine years that is has been online, "The Best Page in the Universe" has become a cultly followed website which has spawned many imitation pages. Generally, these "knock-off" websites can be placed in one of three different categories:
- Parodies which publically assert Maddox has influenced their website; many of these even proudly imitate Maddox's style of writing, artwork, logos, and trademark colour 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 4 September, 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 26 September, 2005, he posted the results, donating $3,068. [18]
External links
