A mystery solved. When I got my first issue of Gastronomica I kinda sheepishly thanked the person who recommended it. I didn't remember ordering it but I didn't want to say that. It might be taken as a symptom of dementia and, if that is happening, it's not the sort of thing you want to broadcast. I have enough problems with all the typos at times like now, when I type directly into the RadioLand text box instead of using Word™ with the gentle helping hand of Clippie. Even then, a recipe might get posted calling for the ingredient "freshly ground black leper."
Today, I got an email from my sister in Columbus, OH. Here is what she said:
Don't pay the invoice for Gastronomica. I sent a gift
Subscription for a year. If problems, let me know and
I'll contact them at UCBerkeley.
So it turns out I’m not losing my mind, at least not that way. The Gastronomica was a gift from a wonderful person I would love even if she weren’t my sister. I’d thank her by name but it is my convention not to use any real names of friends and family here. I’ll call her “Ruth” and that will remind her of the times we spent at the piano singing “Dost Thou Love Me, Sister Ruth” as she played a theme from Haydn’s Surprise Symphony. Thank you, sister Ruth!
By the way, sister Ruth, Clippie does not like your second sentence! He says “Fragment; Consider Revising.” Blood runs thicker than water, however, so I shot him to even the odds. Surprisingly, for an animated inanimate inane object, the little SOB does bleed. Now I feel bad.
FYI: Though, in the US, “Clippie” is only an annoying Microsoft wizard that was supposed to go away in Office XP, a “clippie” is a bus conductor in the UK. For more revelations about the everyday language of our partners-in-arms, visit this site.
Coda: The surprise is a sforzando in the second movement of the Haydn symphony, his 94th. At one time, when we were both old enough to know better, sister Ruth and I developed a skit of sorts. She would play on an electrified Hohner clavinet and I would stand solemnly by the amplifier. Just before the sforzando, I would reach down to the volume knob with the practiced precision of a sommelier, and crank it up all the way. Now that, that, was a sforzando (usually they’re just an sfz).
That’s all I have to say tonight about surprises and sforzandos. I did switch to Word™ midway through this, even though I hate it when I’m told “Haydn” should be “Hayden”. Franz Josef Haydn lived a long life (1732-1809) at times contemporary with the lives of J. S. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. In the end, they say, he did suffer dementia, or maybe it was delirium. He would sit down at the keyboard to play an incredibly dissonant chord, Dagwood sandwich heapings of minor and diminished intervals, more “wrong notes” than either Carlo Gesualdo or even Jimi Hendrix could imagine, then he’d laugh hysterically and put his head down on the keyboard. Oh to be a fly caught in a cobweb on the walls of that mind.
5:32:13 PM 
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