A petty officer stationed at Pearl Harbor opens a pack of Chee-tos, only to discover…

…the largest Chee-to in the world.

Chee-tos Development Manager Kevin Cogan’s job is to ponder such mysteries. He believes that some of the cheddar seasoning in the company’s machines built up and plopped out in big blob. That sneaked past inspectors.

“We call it Seasoning Accumulation,” Cogan said. “If you love cheese, this is the Chee-to for you. It’s beyond dangerously cheesy.”

“Dangerously cheesy” indeed. Somehow, the Chee-to has found its way to the Midwest:

The folks in Algona, Iowa — a one-movie-theater town with 5,970 residents — can hardly wait to get their hands on the giant Chee-to. They plan to shellac it, lay it on plush velvet and put it under Plexiglas.

“This giant Chee-to could be a boon to our local economy,” said Tom Straub, owner of Algona’s Sister Sarah’s Bar. “Anything we can do to attract visitors to our town would be good.”

Me, I’d be worried (well, “worried” is way too strong a word) about shipping the thing from Hawaii to Iowa. I’m not sure that I’d trust FedEx and bubblewrap with such a delicate cargo. A courier? Well, that flight from Hawaii to Iowa’s awfully long, and airline food these days isn’t so good, if you get my drift….

AOL blocked 1 Billion pieces of spam yesterday to its 35 million users, according to the NYDaily News — up from 780 million pieces two weeks ago:

A recent report from independent tech consultancy Ferris Research estimated 30% of inbound E-mail at U.S.-based Internet service providers is spam.

Ferris forecast this spiraling problem will cost U.S. organizations more than $10 billion in 2003 because it “consumes computing resources, email administrator and helpdesk personnel time, and reduces workers’ productivity.”

My own mailbox reflects this upswing. One of my accounts gets an average of 70 pieces of spam a day; between all my accounts, I probably delete about 100 a day.

Legislation won’t help. Most of the spammers are (or easily could be) far beyond the reach of U.S. law, and I’m fully confident that any attempt to craft a content-based law to control spam would be perverted to restrict legitimate content.

The answer is technological. I know the wizards are working on it, and I hope to try a solution or two in the near-ish future. I’ll report back.

USA Today reports that your $20 bills will be more colorful starting this fall.

On March 27, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving will unveil a new remake of the double-sawbuck, adding “one predominant, yet subtle, color that will appear in the background and at least one other color,” along with other new security measures.

This will be the first U.S. currency to be a color other than green.

The $20 is the most commonly counterfeited bill in the USA, and close to 40% of the money seized in this country in the last fiscal year was made with laser printers, up from less than 1% in 1995.

The plan is to update currency every seven to 10 years. After the new $20 is introduced, the $50 and the $100 will come next.

In New York, it’s not at all uncommon to see signs in lunch restaurants and other retail establishments saying that they won’t accept $100s — and in some cases $50s. Even with the 1996 redesign, there’s too much counterfeit floating around. And if there’s so much around in New York, can you imagine how much counterfeit U.S. currency there must be overseas, where people aren’t as familiar with the money as Americans are?

[Later: I took a closer look at that press release linked to above. It’s dated June 20, 2002. So this isn’t exactly new news. The only actually new thing is the date of the unveiling; otherwise, it’s USA Today that make it news today. This is instructive for students of the news media.]

Crossword aficianados know that the NYTimes crossword gets progressively harder as the week goes on. Saturday’s is generally a cast iron bitch on wheels. This kind of correction, from today’s paper (unlinked because the Times doesn’t archive corrections as such on its site), won’t help:

The crossword puzzle on Saturday provided an erroneous clue for 12 Down, seeking the answer “mare.” “Mate for `my friend’ Flicka” was incorrect because Flicka, in the Mary O’Hara story, was a mare; her mate would be a stallion.

A friend of mine who rides mostly BMWs swears that Harley riders are the scum of the earth. Me, I don’t care much. I just love the name of this Harley club, reported in the NYTimes.

Instead, the guys with the mezuzas on their Harley-Davidsons will be riding for the first time as a group in Daytona, Fla., during Bike Week, the annual bikers’ Woodstock for half a million motorcyclists.

From the New Scientist:

Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.

… Groucho, that is. John Steinbeck, too.

Cason showed a waybill for the shipment, which listed Spanish translations of books including “Who Moved My Cheese,” by Spencer Johnson, journalism textbooks, Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” and speeches by the late civil rights leader [Martin Luther] King [Jr.].

Wonderful. Bad pop-management books, too. I’m sure the Cuban government didn’t want to raise the question, “Cheese? Oh, yeah — I remember cheese. Hey, who did take my cheese?”

When I sit in bed, I can see a battery-powered analog alarm clock, the clock on my VCR, and an AC-powered clock radio. I usually wear my watch to bed, and could set the cable box to display the time, too. It makes me nuts when they all display a different time. More than a minute off and I get to work.

The clock in my car has a button that syncs the time precisely to the nearest hour. I usually listen to the CBS all-news station, and press that button more often that I like to admit to.

In the kitchen, there are three clocks. The one on the microwave is usually right. The analog one over the ovens is not; it loses time whenever we use the oven; the heat buckles the paper on which the hours are printed, which interferes with the hands moving. The mechanical digital clock on the ovens themselves hasn’t been right since we moved into the place eight years ago and I’ve long since given up on it.

(I’ve also given up on my Windows computers’ displaying time with any degree of accuracy. The Mac is rock solid, because it automatically syncs up with Apple’s network clock.)

I like to think that this obsession is rooted in my background in wire services and broadcasting, where seconds really do matter. It may well be true, however, that the obsession led to the background, not vice versa.

All of this is a long-winded introduction to why I’m glad I don’t live in Venezuela. There are many reasons I’m glad I don’t live there, actually; a spectacularly painful and enduring sunburn I got there 27 years ago is one of them. But this reason is especially piquant:

Reuters, through CNN, is reporting that clocks in Venezuela are slowing down. It seems that a water shortage on a major river has caused a shortage of hydroelectrical power. In response, the country’s electrical current is running a few cycles short of a full 60. (Not unlike the grid’s management, it sounds like.) This makes clocks run slower.

By the end of each day, the sluggish time pieces still have another 150 seconds to tick before they catch up to midnight…. “Your computer isn’t affected. Your television isn’t affected. No other devices … just clocks,” [Miguel Lara, general manager of the national power grid] added. The meltdown has taken a total 14 hours and 36 minutes from Venezuela’s clocks over 12 of the past 13 months, he said.

From CNN: If End is Near, Do You Want To Know?

A researcher for Rand suggests that if an asteroid is about to hit the Earth, it may be better if governments didn’t tell anyone.

“If you can’t do anything about a warning, then there is no point in issuing a warning at all,” Sommer said earlier this month at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Denver.

“If an extinction-type impact is inevitable, then ignorance for the populace is bliss,” he said.

Tom Ridge, entangled in duct tape, could not be reached for comment. Nor could Dick Cheney, who was reported to be in a secure and undisclosed location. (No, the story doesn’t say that….)

Back in August, I wrote:

How is possible to be Bruce Springsteen? … How can anyone deal with a blank sheet of paper when faced with that kind of creative pressure? It wouldn’t be at all unreasonable for this guy to sit at his desk with an open notebook asking himself, ãWhat in Godâs name do they all want out of me?ä

In this week’s cover story for Entertainment Weekly, the always excellent Ken Tucker asks Springsteen the same question through a slightly different route, and comes away with some great answers. Once they get the obligatory “how do you think you’ll do at the Grammy’s” stuff out of the way, the conversation shifts into an examination of how a megacelebrity can avoid ending up like Elvis:

The key to survival in the line of work he…INVENTED is the replenishment of ideas. You can’t really remain physically or mentally healthy without a leap of consciousness and a continuing, deeper investigation into who you are and what you’re doing. Those are the things that will make sense of the many silly and weird things [he laughs] that will happen to you [when you’re a star]! [But] what keeps you from maintaining that replenishment of ideas is an insecurity about who you let in close to you. To have new ideas you usually need to have new people around, people willing to challenge your ideas in some fashion, or to simply assist you in broadening them. Which means you have to be open to the fact that your thinking isn’t everything, y’know?

The performers who suffer through their success have a difficult time making those connections, because they come from a different environment. The culture of ideas is usually over here [gestures to his left] and you’ve grown up over here [gestures to his right]. In between is this tremendous void that, when Elvis started, was rarely bridged. Bridging that void is your ace in the hole, but to do it you’ve gotta be aware of the limitations of where you come from and be willing to say, ”Well, I’ve gotta go out and seek new things.”

There probably aren’t a ton of musicians who’ll spend time in an interview talking about Bob Herbert, Philip Roth, and Rage Against the Machine.