The Best Page in the Universe

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**The Best Page in the Universe**

URL	http://thebestpageintheuniverse.com/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Satire
Registration	None
Owner	Maddox
Created by	Maddox
Launched	1997
Current status of site	Active

The Best Page in the Universe is a personal satirical 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 "pissed him off." He gave the list to several people on EFnet's #coders. The response was positive, so in 1997 he created the web site.

The title of the page stems 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.^[1]

As of October 31, 2006, the website has an Alexa rank of 6,649 and has had more than 172 million visits.^[2]

1 Site format
2 Articles
- 2.1 Hidden pages
3 Other media
4 Controversy
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Site format

Although the format is lacking in the style and tone of a contemporary weblog, the site could be referenced as such, regardless of Maddox's vocal contempt for weblogs in 2005.^[3]^[4]

The layout is simple and minimalistic in order to save on bandwidth costs, primarily. But in addition to this, Maddox exclaims that it is a silent protest to the contemporary theme of modern websites: too many images, not enough content. It uses large text in light colors on a black background; Maddox explains that reading black text on a white background is like "staring at a light bulb", stating light text on a black background is less harsh to one's eyes .^[5]

The page is headed with an image of Maddox's face juxtapositioned over a bust of Che Guevara. In the image, he is wearing an eye patch and donning a beret emblazoned with the Jolly Roger. Maddox uses this image as a parody of the revolutionary icon, and does not proclaim to be either a socialist or communist.^[5] Instead, he often proclaims himself to be a pirate, and typically portrays himself as such in his articles and artwork.

Maddox also has an online store which sells merchandise such as stickers, hooded sweatshirts, 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."^[6]

[edit] Articles

Most of Maddox's articles are satirical, focusing on society and pop culture, although he does occasionally write a nonsensical article with no intentions other than being entertaining.

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

Maddox boasts excessively about masculinity and "ass kicking" in some of his articles, especially his earlier ones. One of his earlier articles that brought him his initial internet fame was an article ridiculing children's artwork. Many of his earlier articles were controversial for his self-proclaimed hatred of children, senior citizens, women's rights activists, vegetarians, environmentalists, and jocks.

The articles as a whole have evolved throughout the years. Earlier articles between 1998 and 1999 were short and were posted several times per month. As updates became less frequent, the articles became longer. Newer articles also included multimedia such as sound clips and add-on pages. Some recent articles have also been translated, such as the Sideways article.^[7]^[8]

[edit] 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. The Best Fan Page in the Universe, a major fan site of Maddox, posted a large list of them.^[9]

[edit] Other media

Maddox has shifted attention into comics and books, and updates started coming in less frequently than before. Updates to his site have become so infrequent that their non-appearance has become an ongoing joke. After announcing his book, he wrote, "Since I'm no longer writing that book, updates should be more regular now."

He recently launched a competition for people to send him cartoons about himself or his website, most of which are attacks about emails for "more updates." Later, he parodied this himself by stating that now that he's finished with the comic book, he'd be able to "Not update the site more regularly." 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. ^[10]^[11]^[12]

[edit] Controversy

With regard to his hatemail pages, Maddox has been accused of not actually arguing against the points his detractors make, but simply insulting the detractor and distracting the reader with visual aids.^[13] 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." ^[14]

[edit] 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 [1]. On September 11, 2005, the site was banned in Saudi Arabia. His site is also banned in Myanmar. Maddox himself has said that his website has been filtered and banned on Websense, Lexmark, and the Department of Defense. ^[15]

[edit] Mothers Against Maddox

Beth Robbins, a concerned 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 the Websense article including a link to the original Geocities site, Mothers Against Maddox was inundated with visitors and repeatedly exceeded its bandwidth limit. In response, Maddox hosted a mirror so all his fans could view it[2]. After Maddox posted the petition link, the MAM petition shot up to the Top 10 Active Petitions on PetitionOnline, with Maddox fans flooding the petition and posting extremely vulgar comments. The petition was eventually deactivated.[3]

[edit] Something Awful

Maddox has a long-standing feud with Something Awful webmaster Richard Kyanka and many of the site's forum members. After a falling-out with the site's administrators, Maddox berated Something Awful [4] as being too capitalist because of the fee required to access their message boards. Detractors point out that Maddox sells merchandise from his website. In response, 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." [5]

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 criticizing Something Awful and attracting negative attention from the administrators. He advised Something Awful to "quit panhandling," and later posted a thread containing a link to a parody of the Something Awful front page [6]. As a result, he was banned from accessing the forum domain.

Something Awful has struck back against Maddox a few times, mocking his alleged elitism and his style of writing [7].

During an Attack of the Show interview, Something Awful writer "Dr." David Thorpe cleverly claimed "[they] steal most of [their] content from a guy named Maddox." A response was quickly posted, replying to various unsupported claims that Maddox steals content from Something Awful and reposts it as his own. [8]

According to Maddox at his New York City stop on his signing tour for The Alphabet of Manliness, the feud was a misunderstanding and "everything's cool... he's a cool guy," referring to Kyanka.