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The Best Page in the Universe

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by WhisperToMe (talk | contribs) at 00:32, 25 April 2004 (=The Website=). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Best Page In The Universe is a personal humorous website created by a University student [1] named George Ouzounian with the nickname Maddox. The website became notorious because of its profane manner of parodying the powerful and the wealthy (ranging from McDonalds to George W. Bush). Maddox presents statistics that show he has more visitors to his site than McDonalds, Pepsi and other large corporations.

Maddox

Source: Official 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 25 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 to write sentences such as, "I'm The Center of the Universe," "I'm better than everyone," "I love me," "I AM KING," etc. (see [2]).

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. The reasoning for the Che Guevara image as the website's logo is a reflection of his disdain for communists and people who wear or own Che Guevara propaganda ("hippies").

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.

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. [3]

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. This evidently pleases him as the information was prominently featured. He also reports that some fire walls come pre-packaged with his site blocked and listed as militant / extremist. This information is unconfirmed by independent parties.

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 am going to eat three".

The website's IRC channel is located in the Whatnet IRC Network. It is #maddox.

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 of 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 to to their inability to realise a joke when they see one.

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