The Best Page in the Universe

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The Best Page in the Universe
URL	http://maddox.xmission.com/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Satire Fratire
Registration	None
Owner	Maddox
Created by	Maddox
Launched	1997
Current status	Active

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

Maddox said that he decided to name it "The Best Page in the Universe" despite his knowledge that Yahoo! blocked sites with the words "the best" in the title from inclusion in their search engine.^[1]

As of May 3, 2008, Xmission.com, which contains the home page and related pages for The Best Page in the Universe, had an Alexa rank of 5,642^[2] and has had more than 217 million visits. TheBestPageInTheUniverse.net, which hosts all of the articles written by Maddox, had an Alexa rank of 11,574 on the same date^[3].

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

[edit] History

Maddox started The Best Page in the Universe in 1996.^[4] Maddox said that the website originated from a text document that he wrote listing 50 things that "pissed him off." He gave the list to several people on EFnet's #coders. According to Maddox, the positive response led him to create the website.^[5]

[edit] Site format

Maddox states on his site the layout is minimalistic primarily in order to save on bandwidth costs and to protest the theme of many contemporary websites: too many images, small fonts, not enough content. Maddox uses large text in light colors on a black background; he explains that reading black text on a white background is like "staring at a lightbulb," and that light text on a black background is less harsh on one's eyes .^[5]

The page is headed with an image of Maddox's face superimposed 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, saying that Che Guevara is remembered as "Che the revolutionary," not "Che the pinko."^[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]

Maddox deliberately keeps his site free of advertisements. He does not specifically ask for donations from his readers and does not refuse donations.^[7] One time, he asked for donations in the form of store purchases for the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and collected over $3000 in donations.^[8] "The reason this site doesn't have advertisements on it is because I want to say whatever I want to without having to worry about offending advertisers," wrote Maddox in an article regarding plagiarism of his material.

[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 pictures of 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 writes about his masculinity in some of his articles, especially his earlier ones. One of his earlier articles that brought him his initial internet fame was an article that ridiculed artwork attributed to children. Many of his earlier articles were controversial for his self-proclaimed hatred of children, senior citizens, women's rights activists, vegetarians, environmentalists, hippies, Mac users 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 and his "Ben Stiller should star in every movie" article.^[9]

On August 29th, 2007, The Best Page in the Universe celebrated its anniversary with "10 years of literary genius."

[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. Maddox Addicts, a new fan site of Maddox, posted a large list of them.^[10]

[edit] Other media

Maddox has shifted attention into comics and books, including The Alphabet of Manliness, published in June 2006, 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.

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.^[11]^[12]^[13]

[edit] Controversy

[edit] Blocking

Due to the controversial content, four countries and some internet filtering products have banned the website. On January 8, 2004, the United Arab Emirates was the first country to ban his website^[14]^{[citation needed]}. On September 11, 2005, the site was banned in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.^{[citation needed]} Qatar has since then unblocked the site.^{[citation needed]} His site is also banned in Myanmar.^{[citation needed]} Maddox himself has said that his website has been filtered and banned on Websense, Lexmark, and the Department of Defense. He has criticized many of them by saying such things as "forget about all the gang bang, bukkake and rape sites your filters miss — satire sites should be your top priority." He has also said they block health and education sites.^[15]. He states that he blocked Websense computers from accessing his site in response to Websense filtering his, claiming that "Being on the receiving end of your self-appointed judicial bullshit for a change, you may disagree with this label and want to submit an appeal to change your categorization...Upon receiving your request, I will give it a passing glance and shrug it off lightly, regardless of the fact that the number of requests to change your status to something else may outweigh the number of requests to keep it the same."

[edit] Mothers Against Maddox

A website called Mothers Against Maddox^[16] is a website which a "concerned mother" named Beth Robbins founded. The website's slogan is, "Help Us Fight and Finally Shut Down the Most Hateful Site on the Internet".^[17] The owner of the website also created a petition asking 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, without clogging the site's bandwidth^[18]. 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, many of which posted vulgar comments. Maddox said that he signed the petition, as "nobody gives a shit." The petition was eventually deactivated^[19].

Maddox states that he received emails with similar viewpoints as expressed by MaM. Such messages often contain sentences expressing a dislike for his viewpoints or that his site is a bad influence on their children. Maddox responded by saying that if his site offends people, they should not read it and "it's not my job to be your children's guardian."

On October 27, 2007 CNN ran a story about Mothers Against Drunk Driving asking another organization, Mothers Against Illegal Aliens, to cease using "Mothers Against" in the name of their organization. CNN went on to cite various other organizations that use "Mothers Against" in their name with Mothers Against Maddox being one of its examples.^[20]

[edit] Something Awful

Maddox had a misunderstanding^[specify] with Something Awful webmaster Richard Kyanka and many of the site's forum members. In June 2006, Maddox stated that he had resolved his feud with Kyanka at a book signing in New York City.^[21]