Of course, I was developing using an emulated device of level 16 of the API, where everything worked fine. When I tried to run it on emulated devices of API level 7, I got the same error.
The man page for SimpleDateFormat, http://developer.android.com/reference/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html , says that "L" is valid for a month. He also says that "M" is valid.
I changed:
private static SimpleDateFormat sdf_myDate = new SimpleDateFormat("LLLL d yyyy HHmm", Locale.US);
to:
private static SimpleDateFormat sdf_myDate= new SimpleDateFormat("MMMM d yyyy HHmm", Locale.US);
and it worked on both API 7 and 16.
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