Odd, because when I crossed the Atlantic, about twenty years ago, I noticed that "to spit" was, in common American usage, no longer an irregular verb; that the past tense, at least in conversation, of "to spit" was, not "spat", but "spit". As in "I will never forget the day that this drunk guy spit at my best friend". It didn't seem to have much to do with education or region, either.
But in the Slate article all the "spits" and "spats" were in the right place and tense.
(A Google for "were spit on" gave me 10,500 articles, while for Googling "were spat on" gave me only 950 [and a "did I mean were spent on?"]. All the first pages were talking about Vietnam vets. )
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I remember about eight years ago the then Warner Brothers co-studio head Billy Gerber told me that he got weekly calls from people who wanted to make, direct or star in a Sandman film. "On Wednesday," he said, "Michael Jackson called about it." Given the comments some months ago from Alan Horn and Jeff Robinoff, who now run Warner Brothers, I don't believe the calls from people who want to make Sandman have decreased in the last eight years -- quite the reverse. Which I mention because I got a small deluge of letters from people asking me what I thought about Joel Shumacher saying in an interview that he'd love to direct a Sandman film and wondering if that meant that it was now about to happen, and of course it doesn't and it isn't. It simply puts Mr Schumacher in a very long line of people who want to make Sandman, some way ahead of Michael Jackson.
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And on the subject of unlikely things, if someone had told me a book of mine would turn up on the Good Housekeeping list of "Ten Wonderful Romance Novels" I would have accused them of drunken tomfoolery and pulling an old man's leg. And yet, behold: http://magazines.ivillage.com/goodhousekeeping/view/babes/articles/0,,284607_707518,00.html
You want to read the first dozen or so pages of Eddie Campbell's new graphic novel? You know you do... http://www.firstsecondbooks.net/bdda/bddaGift01.html
My friend Dianna Graf from Tasmania just sent me link to http://www.workfriendly.net/browse/Office2003Blue//http/www.neilgaiman.com//journal
which is this journal placed in an, um, workfriendly context.
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Someone named Lynn wrote to tell me you could no longer right click and cut and paste on my journal from IE7. I checked and she's right: while you can do it fine with Firefox, neither IE7 nor Opera will let you cut and paste from anywhere in the www.neilgaiman.com website right now, on a PC. (Macs are fine.) This is mysterious. I'll put the webelf on to it and we'll get it fixed.
Labels: miscellaneous, oddments, spit or spat, stuff, things etc, very long line with Michael Jackson bringing up the rear