CANS ACROSS AMERICA

Last week, we pointed out that Michael Jackson’s $50-million endorsement deal with Pepsi would, if you stopped in at your neighborhood 7-Eleven, amount to 71,428,571 cans of pop. That’s hard to comprehend, so let’s put it this way: If all those cans were laid end to end, they could stretch from Michael’s home in Encino to New York--following the wandering 4,152-mile route to be traversed by Hands Across America next Sunday--and still have enough cans to continue on almost to Miami.

Nobody should try this, of course, because Pepsi isn’t a sponsor of Hands Across America. Coke is.