We are not big on writing about food. We don't watch too much of the endless parade of food television shows. And we are completely befuddled about a reality show (actually there are more than one) about cakes. We get the feeling that some of the older Romans must have had back in the early 4th century when Alaric came knocking on the doors of Rome. "This could be trouble" they must have said as they glanced at the hordes of Visigoths.

We have had friends and acquaintances who seemed preoccupied with food. They could give a recitation of all the meals they had since they last saw you on the previous day, and a recitation of those rather dry facts would be offered as part of the conversation. We had one friend who would plod on endlessly about the individual items, and we would roll our eys, stamp our feet and even blanch out loud that this was not an appropriate topic, and the next day she would be back to prattling on about what she had consumed. That friendship did not last. But it might be an organizational thing, in some offices, the people standing outside our lowly cubicles would recall memorable meals at local restaurants as if this were a kind of pinnacle of human experience.

We have noted in the past that there is even a category on the Internet for this: the "Grilled Cheese Blog" in which a designated blogger would recall the memorable sandwich that he had. So we shy away from such things. Except for today. Thinking about the ancient Romans in their heyday, we are reminded of their preoccupation with signs and portents. By signs, we do not mean the more common contemporary meaning, but the ancient one, a signifying appearance of an unusual phenomenon and its link to the future. There were specialized priests who would look at the entrails of some poor domestic creature slaughtered for the purpose and divine the future from the patterns of the entrails. It was a school of ancient study, even immortalized in bronze, showing the different important aspects of liver for detailed study and contemplation.

So when we opened a can of common chicken noodle soup, the popular brand in the red and white can, our attention was riveted by something we had never seen before. As the title suggests it was a noodle. A noodle in the shape of a square, instead of the uniform small yellowish strip that we had eaten for decades. It was probably a manufacturing defect, some bit of software did not catch the deviation from accepted means in the shape and size of the object. But we contemplated it for a while, and even wondered briefly if it were safe to eat. And we took photos for posterity. Several large yellow squares, not particularly appetizing appeared in the heat-proof bowl as we prepared our humble luncheon. And thoughts raced through our minds - lawyers, world records, product recalls, product tampering, food safety, lawyers, courtroom trials, impassioned pleas, drama, movie rights, screenplays, subsidiary and ancillary rights to other productions. Across the universe, throughout the future, reserving rights from the beginning of time, in any medium now existing or developed in the future. And those noodles took on a kind of glow in our imaginations, as we saw portals of oppourtunity opening, staffs of people with files carrying papers into meetings, long rows of computers with people answering calls staring intently, the course of human history being altered. But then, our hunger growing, and our need for edible carbohydrates growing ever more insistent, we decide to compromise, to take pictures of the strange phenomena, the giant square, even hideous noodles, bringing non-conformity to our lives.