Dumb and Summa

Has anyone noticed the amazing similarities between the lives and work of Mike Myers and Jim Carrey?

To begin with, they`re both Canadian comedians. Not impressed? OK, how about both have made careers out of portraying social morons? Or that they surround themselves with beautiful women as a sort of double bluff to be cool by association? Aha. You`re attaining awareness.

Just compare their output. I don`t know which came first, but what got to me initially were the vaguely similar movies "Ace Ventura, Pet Detective" (Carrey) and "Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery" (Myers). All right, so the one was a detective farce and the other a spy burlesque, but look at the similarities in title. Both men incidentally went on from there to prolific girl-decorated freak-comedy careers. And both movies are furthermore the baffling cause of serious debate among perfectly bright adults as to the actual sense to be made out of these two clowns.

Let`s move on to Myers` "Wayne`s World" and Carrey`s "Dumb and Dumber". Aren`t these two films way too similar for comfort? And what`s with the cults around them? There are actually little cabals of people who take pride in rehashing, endlessly, the plots and lines from these two movies, and others such as Star Trek and Monty Python, in public places.

But I`m getting distracted. Here`s the killer: Has anyone seen "The Cat in the Hat" and "The Grinch"? And wondered why both Carrey and Myers chose characters from Dr Seuss` books to pin a movie on?

And to think they could have stuck to making movies like "So I Married an Axe Murderer" and "Man on the Moon". It`s a shame.

MTN and Vodacom are trying to outdo each other at being each other.

Carel Alberts, special projects editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

In exactly the same inexplicable and senseless way, MTN and Vodacom are trying to outdo each other at being each other.

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say: Dudes, we`ve had enough. Enough of Y`ello Summer and Gimme Summa. (Who the heck is desperate to own summer after someone else already put dibs on it?) It kills me to see money being thrown at this ongoing mutual referencing. It`s becoming a kind of sordid, public love-hate fest, like some unholy, pouting, back-to-back and grizzled stage performance featuring Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Cell C, by contrast, tries valiantly to be different. The bungling Cell C TV girl is funny if she`s not in Isidingo, and I can forgive Cell C some of its slack-off "Tell Someone" billboards, because the accompanying TV ads have a fun and flavour all their own.

A whack of other cellular me-too examples exists, but I have in my life never had to wade through a more unsearchable, hidden, or otherwise impenetrable body of information as exists on these two sites, or the information about them in the Google yields I got. Probably cognisant of the remarkable coincidence in the launch dates of their products or new features, the networks don`t even seem to announce them by name. As a result, it took me half a day to get a handful of launch dates together, finally next-paging through near-unsearchable archives.)

The ones that I am able to prove include top-up (Vodacom launched this in July and MTN in December) and cellphone Internet banking (both in July last year). A host of other more vaguely remembered examples exists. I feel like getting the brand managers together in a room with one-way mirrors and let them work through their issues. "Guys," I would say. "Who stole whose girl/boyfriend? And why must the rest of us care?"

But it`s not just that these companies indulge in too many me-too launches - I will concede that competitiveness means they have to stay on top of their game, and have to answer strike with counter-strike. My problem is that they often call their new products and features practically the same things. MTN Pay As You Go came first, I seem to recall. Then Vodago came along. Not Vodasave, Cheapskate or Build-a-credit-record-at-higher-than-contract-costs. VodaGO.

I ask you. At this rate, they may as well share certain central resources, like branding and advertising agencies.