partition cloning tar question

I am tar(ing) over a fs from one machine to the other and getting some
feedback that I would like to check
with you guys:

here is the command I run from the machine being "cloned"

tar -clpf - -C /var | ssh 128.233.200.14 '(cd /mnt/var; tar -xvpf - )' ;

ocasionally I get a message like:

tar: var/log/messages: time stamp 2006-09-08 21:44:24 is 34187 s in the
future

I am wondering why my messages file is time stamped as tonight at 9:44pm
(its 5:20pm now)
when I view the file in the file system I get

# ls -la messages
-rw------- 1 root root 175153 Sep 8 15:21 messages
Received on Sat Sep 9 00:50:18 2006