My, oh my. The things that happen. The Romans used to have a festival called Saturnalia, during which the masters and their servants would switch roles and run wild in the streets. Nowadays, running wild in the streets is the rule rather than the exception, but some holidays still bring sacred alterations. For example, last night, Faustus’s birthday transformed me into a patricidal murderess whose married lover had already killed both her mother and her brother at the behest of her scheming archeologist father.

If this is difficult for you to keep straight, imagine how I felt! Of course, this Byzantine plot developed in the last years of the freewheeling Victorian era, a time when patricidal murderesses were coming out of the woodwork.

In honor of the celebration and my exposure as a greedy criminal, I decided to bend the rules of the South Beach diet enough to include a piece of scrumptious chocolate cake. Unfortunately, I return today to my dietetic peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, an experience that calls to mind, thanks to the minimal stature and flavor of the low-carb bread, the licking of a postage stamp.