Strange /var/log/messages file

[8-bit]

I checked my /var/log/messages file in Puppy Linux Slacko 5.5 and got something unexpected.
The Date at the beginning of the line showed Dec 22 and then further down, showed Dec 24 for a bunch of lines and then back to Dec 22.
So my question is how a log file is supposedly showing events for a future date?
Has something invaded my Puppy frugal install?

Along with this, when using Seamonkey (latest version by update), and here on the forum, I click on a post I want to read and I experience a complete computer lockup with the screen that was showing preserved, but the mouse and keyboard completely locked up and not responsive.
Alt-Ctrl-Backspace does not recover and a momentary press of the Power button does not either.
I have to do a forced power off by holding in the power button!
This is an intermittent thing. But it seems to be happening more frequently.
I checked the CPU temperature and it is well within specs so I doubt that is due to processor overheating.
Also, I did a comprehensive memory check and the computer memory passed with flying colors.

Any suggestions as to what I should look for to diagnose this?

I am attaching my /var/log/messages file as an afterthought.

[npierce]

So my question is how a log file is supposedly showing events for a future date?
Has something invaded my Puppy frugal install?

No.

This is related to a change Barry made, in March 2010, to prevent timestamps from the future from being written to a partition during e2fsck. In the init script in initrd, the TZ environment variable is set to a fictitious time zone 23 hours east of Greenwich ("TZ=XXX-23"). Although /etc/localtime is later set properly to your timezone, a couple of logging daemons (busybox syslogd and busybox klogd) were started when TZ=XXX-23, so they have a strange idea about what time it really is, and so will enter timestamps from the future in the log files.

This issue has come up a number of times in recent years, and I reported it in the then-current Precise bugs thread last February, and suggested a fix. For more detail, see that post:

syslogd & klogd send messages from the future.

By the way, this would have nothing to do with your lockup issue.