If I had known how those minuscule boiled sardines from the Japanese grocery store tasted, I would have been eating them every day for my whole life. And now I will. I do not normally attempt to cook Japanese food for the same reasons I don’t bake much and am not really very good at it: you have to follow precise directions. Thus, distinctly imprecise directions for two delicious American things I made in a not very orderly manner using ingredients from the Japanese grocery store:

Pollack roe spread: Melt some finely chopped shallot and a clove of garlic in a couple of teaspoons of butter or ghee in a heavy skillet. When they are softened but not browned at all, add another two or three teaspoons of butter and melt that too. Let it cool until you can taste it without hurting yourself; you don’t want the roe to really cook, so don’t rush the cooling process. Squeeze the contents of four egg sacks into the butter mixture and stir it around until it’s creamy. Finally, stir in a couple of teaspoons of minced pickled meyer lemon. I add a tablespoon or two of olive oil at this point to make sure the mixture stays spreadable in the fridge. If you’re eating it right away, you can just blop it right on a piece of toast and eat it. If you fridge it, you can spread it on warm toast later and it will melt perfectly, liquidy at the edges and cold in the center. A little chopped parsley or lovage on top is pretty and delicious. The first time I made it I added the parsley to the mix. It tasted good, but muddied the coral color. Now I put it on top.

A salad of golden beet greens and tiny sardines: Fry the teeny tiny sardines in butter until they are crispy and slightly colored. Wrench some beet greens apart and put them in a bowl, or wilt them slightly if they aren’t in the finest shape. Chop a golden beet or two into tiny matchstick strips and toss them until they are dripping in a vinaigrette made with shallots and a little bit of mustard. (I don’t abide with this nonsense about forty to one ratios of oil to vinegar. Vinegar is delicious. I usually use something like two to one with plain raw apple cider vinegar and lots of salt. I don’t normally use very much dressing though.) Dump the beets atop a pile of their own greens, and throw the sardines on top of that.

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A few unimaginative types scoffed at the idea of open source housing. That in itself was so surprising (where have you people been?) that it has been on my mind a lot lately. Voila a Metropolis article and the Sam Mockbee film.

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The Rules About Hotlinking and Deep Linking are foggy and skewed a bit toward the paranoid; Wikipedia includes the anachronistic charge of “changing the perceived meaning through an unapproved context” as a controversial use of inline linking. (The meaning of this is something to tussle with, but trying to prevent it from happening is like debating infant baptism. I suppose I believe in it becuase I’ve seen it happen.) Most people assume a hyperlink comprises, or ought to comprise, an explanation and an exit warning, and must be either a species of footnote or a blunt way of shuttling the conversation or interaction elsewhere. That makes sense in a business application or a website designed to accommodate the completion of specific tasks. In the vast rest of the internet, that misses an awful lot. Links, especially within paragraphs of the kind of trailing, conversational text that’s characteristic of so much of what’s warm and intimate about the internet, ought to poke through as secondary sprigs of of communication and familiarity. Any robot or search engine can provide a definition, but so far only a human writer can use hyperlinks in a distinct, idiosyncratic manner; as a tangents, jokes, arch references, or ways of noting the obscure. Linking in online writing is as distinctive as voice.