some themes acted better than others. I suspect a lot of them have a <p> (or some such) somewhere at the beginning, which would pretty much reset font characteristics.
I was missing a </strong> close tag. Odin was using the same one I was using, the default. I don't understand why my machine was never affected.
I thought that may have been it, only because I did the same thing with a different font attribute in the footer one night.

I looked at different combinations; different browsers and different themes had different results. but also, it seems
like there is an option under tools --> content where you can disallow the page from changing the fonts that you have
set. that might have something to do with the different symptoms that we saw.