I forgot this one last night... Here's a new eyeless needle:
I have the date displayed in the European style: Monday 20 October 08 in the Menu...
Ok, nevermind. Gunug and Jim to the rescue again!
I figured it out, thanks to those invisible posts. What I observed was that there was no space between the day of the week and day or between the day and month in Get Info windows, even though it was fine in the Menu.
I went poking around in the International system panel. The date fields are in little ovals. One would think that a space between each field would be a given. It's not. You can add or delete spaces. I'm not sure why you'd want to. I'm also not sure how those spaces got deleted to begin with.