Category: Making

Projects that make or build something.

Post #1698: Razor-blade longevity test, the redo

 

This post replaces all my prior posts on extending the life of a razor blade.  Because, I think I goofed.

Based on my most recent analysis:

Whatever it is that dulls a razor blade, short of abuse that puts big nicks in the blade, you can’t see it under a low-magnification microscope.  Blades that appear perfectly sharp, and (by measurement) retain their full width, can, nevertheless, be too dull to remove your beard.  I have no idea why.

The ONLY test for whether a razor blade remains sharp and usable is to shave with it.  Neither examining it with a low-power (USB) microscope, nor testing it with a home-made sharpness tester, provided useful information on how well a blade would shave.

Of the three things commonly cited on the internet, for extending the life of a razor blade, I now believe that:

  1. Softening your beard prior to shaving is critical for razor blade life.
  2. Drying off your razor blade — even a stainless steel blade — is necessary to keep it from dulling prematurely.
  3. Once it goes dull, there’s nothing you can do.  Stropping a dull stainless steel blade does not return it to a usable state.

Number 2 is a change from my prior posts, and that’s really the key point of this post.

Edit:  And I now know why:  Water spots.  A calcium carbonate deposit (a.k.a., water spot) is much thicker than the edge of a razor.  Tested and confirmed by comparing distilled water to tap water, Post #1699.

The upshot is, if you use shaving cream or (arguably) a high-end shaving soap, and dry your blade after each use, you’ve done your due diligence to get the most out of your razor blade or disposable shaver.  Whether more extreme measures add to that — keeping the blade stored in oil, freezing it, or whatnot — would require more analysis.

A recap and a bit of detail follows.

Recap

I’m trying to determine whether any of the suggestions for extending blade life, commonly found on the internet, actually work.

I boiled this down to:

  • Dry your blade
  • Strop your blade
  • Soften your beard.

I wanted to be as objective as possible, so I tried to avoid rating blades based on how the shave felt, figuring, there’s a lot of subjective leeway in that.  Instead, I was going to rely on how the looked, and how sharp they appeared to be, based on a home-made sharpness tester.

In hindsight, that was a mistake.  Appearance was an adequate way to judge blades if they were thoroughly abused.  But for blades that have not been abused — without visible nicks or erosion in the edge — it turns out that a sharp, usable blade looks just like a dull, unusable one.

Results.

Soften your beard/lubricate your face:  CONFIRMED

If nothing else, this razor blade test has broken me of a life-long bad shaving habit.  I shave(d) with soap.  Most recently I’ve been using Dove, because that’s supposed to have more emollients in it and be generally nicer to your skin.

And, not unrelated, I’d typically get three shaves out of a blade before I got the urge to replace it.  Maybe five, at the outside.  But by the time I got through that fifth shave, it required multiple passes of the blade and, basically, it hurt.

For this final test, I decided to shave half my face using Dove soap, and half with Barbasol.  The main active ingredient in Barbasol is stearic acid.  That’s the same as the main fat in coconut oil, and it is frequently recommended as a beard softening agent.

From the first shave, it was absolutely clear that shaving with Barbasol was a lot better than shaving with soap.  In the end, I got ten decent shaves with Barbasol, versus a typical 3 to 5 shaves with soap. 

That one is case closed, as far as I’m concerned.  I’d conservatively say that using Barbasol easily doubles blade life, relative to shaving with Dove soap.

If you want a more in-depth dive into the ingredients of shaving cream and shaving soap, see Post #1668.

Strop your stainless steel blade:  Busted

Stropping means running the blade “backward” — opposite the direction of cutting — over some suitable material.  The idea is to polish and hone the very final edge of the razor’s edge.

The practice of stropping razor blades to re-sharpen them disappeared just about the same time that stainless steel blades (above) took over the market.  I strongly suspect that this was cause-and-effect.  Stainless razor blades are just too hard (or wear resistant, take your pick) for stropping to have much effect.  I went through this in the historical perspective on stropping, Post #1689.

I have now tried all of the following, and none of it resulted in restoring a dull blade to usable status.  I.e., from the standpoint of shaving, none of this sharpened a stainless steel blade:

  • Stropping on a leather strop, blade held in razor.
  • Stropping by rubbing on the inside of a plain water glass.
  • Stropping by rubbing on the inside of a curved borosilicate glass.
    • Low curvature (measuring cup)
    • Higher curvature (oil lamp chimney base)
    • High curvature (oil lamp chimney top)
  • Stropping on borosilicate glass, with abrasive metal cleaner
  • Stropping using a standard carbon-steel knife steel.
  • Stropping using a commercial leather strop plus green “compound”.

None of that seemed to make the least bit of difference in how well the blade shaved.  In particular, using an actual commercial leather strop and compound, 30 strops, did nothing to restore a blade to usability.

Finally, literally sharpening a blade — removing significant amounts of material from the blade edge — destroys its usability.  It makes it too narrow for the safety razor, and it then leaves stubble instead of cutting cleanly.

Stropping, steeling, sharpening, and so on.  Total bust.

Dry your razor after use.  I’ll be damned.

 

For this one, I cooked up a fairly elaborate experiment to show that nothing happened to stainless steel blades if you leave them wet.  I took six blades (three new, three used), kept one edge wet for a week (either continuously, or dunked in water once a day), and kept the other edge dry.

And, by eye, there was absolutely no difference, under a low-powered microscope, between the wet and dry edges.  There was no difference in sharpness, based on my crude sharpness tester.  So I originally concluded that drying a stainless blade after every use is unnecessary.

Then the stropping experiment finally ended, I put a different razor blade in my razor.  This was one of my test blades above, and I expected it to shave like a new blade.

Well, I was half right.  One side shave just like a new blade.  The other side was so dull as to be unusable.

When I pulled it out of the razor, the unusable side was the one that had been dipped in water a few times a day, for a week, and left to dry at room temperature.

So, I’ll be damned.  I can think of no other explanation for this, other than, failing to dry off that blade, for what amounts to a couple of week’s worth of dunking, left it dull.

I may look a little more carefully at this.  I want to repeat that.  And some people say that extreme measures can preserve blade life even further.  Others claim that the dulling is due to build-up of minerals on the blade, from hard water.  So I may want to look at all of that.

But as of right now, for reasons that I absolutely cannot fathom, it appears that you do, in fact, need to dry off a stainless blade to keep a sharp edge on it.  Or, at least, failing to do that will dull the edge.

I have no clue why that is.  I’m only attesting that, based on a sample of one blind shave with one carefully-treated blade, that appears to be true.

Anyway, dry off your stainless steel blade.  Apparently confirmed.

Edit: See next post for the explanation.  It has nothing to do with rust or oxidation of a stainless-steel blade.   Post #1699.

Post #1697: Can this marriage be saved?

 

Marriage.  Crap.  Pile o’ shit.  Ex-furniture.  Late mid-century-modern TV chair.

This thing, or, more properly, these things:

This is what’s left of two American-made, walnut, totally “moderne” TV chairs, likely dating to around 1970.  There are famous and expensive examples of this type of furniture.  But I suspect this was “Sears Better” from the period.

The back story is that I moved into a little 1950s house in Vienna VA in 1993.  The sole criterion was that I could walk to the Metro, as my job was in downtown DC.

Across the street was a nice couple, him retired military, her his wife.  Colonel Pike was a force to be reckoned with.  After a snowstorm, I’ve never seen a sidewalk shoveled with such precision.  I can still recall what must have been this 80-year-old guy, walking around on the roof of his house, fixing this and that.  Adjusting the weather vane in the shape of a golfer.

As a guy, I occasionally did roof maintenance myself.  But, at that age, tromping around on his roof?  Simultaneously macho, admirable, and batshit crazy.  It gave me the willies watching him.  I don’t doubt that at 80 he was more than my roof-top equal at the time.  Yet I cannot even guess how his wife felt about this.

As time wore on, I got in the habit of shoveling our neighbor’s sidewalk as I shoveled my own.   Including Colonel Pike’s.  No doubt, not to his standards, but you do what you can.

Eventually, cancer got him.  I believe it was leukemia.  I clearly recall him saying that.  So no doubt he faced up to it.

My wife caught up with Mrs. Pike, at some point, just kind of sobbing while standing on the sidewalk. My wife did what she could.  I cannot imagine the depth of that love.  Lost without her life-long partner.

But let’s put that aside, guy-style.

The point here is the mounds of possessions that got taken to the street, as Mrs. Pike planned to move to Texas, to live near her daughter.

That was Döstädning.  Swedish death cleaning.  Though I did not know the term at the time.

My son, with an eye for treasure, picked these two chairs off the pile.  We used them for years, but 40-year-old fabric and foam just didn’t stand up to a bunch of kids crawling all over them.  In the end, the foam broke down, the fabric ripped, my son made one valiant attempt to de-construct what was left.

And what you see above is the result.

Now I’m retired, with way too much time on my hands.  I’m going to try to put these back together.   Not exactly as they were before.  But in the same spirit, as “TV loungers”, or whatever.

We’ll see how it goes.

They say that retirees need hobbies to keep them busy.  As a former small-business owner, all I can say is, screw that.  I’m just not motivated to turn my time and treasure into low-valued objects.

But reconstructing an interesting artifact from the past?   Yeah, I guess I can get on board with that.  So here goes.  Furniture Restoration 101.

Post #1692: Strop-a-Palooza, the finale. Use a knife steel to strop stainless-steel razor blades

 

Edit:  Nope. See below.  Honing a worn stainless-steel blade with a knife steel made the edges look a lot better.  But the blade still shaves badly.  And I have no idea why.

I think I’ve figured out a possibly-effective way to strop or hone a stainless steel razor blade.  Possibly.  Use a sharpening steel.  The thing pictured at the top of the post.

Don’t use an abrasive (e.g., diamond) steel.  Use a common carbon-steel knife sharpening rod.  The last post demonstrated that you can’t abrade much off the edge before the blade is ruined for shaving.

Use the “pull” technique.   Weirdly enough, half the experts on Youtube pull the blade across the steel.  Half push the blade, as if you were cutting into the steel.  That suggests to me that this works either way.  And pulling a razor blade is going to be a lot easier.  Like this technique (Youtube link).

Hold the blade at very shallow angle to the knife steel.  Start at one side of the edge, and pull it across and up the steel.  Flip and repeat as often as you want, because, based no seemingly expert authority, it’s almost impossible to over-steel a knife edge.

I’m not entirely sure this works, but it’s the best I’ve come up with, and it seems to do something.

For sure, this does nothing for any chips in the blade edge that are large enough to be visible with a microscope.  So if a blade edge is badly eroded, honing it in this fashion isn’t going to fix it.  But, that’s fair, as honing or stropping isn’t supposed to repair a damaged cutting edge.  Those really just clean up the very final finish on an otherwise sound cutting edge.

But, maybe it does something to the very edge of the blade.  After vigorous stropping in this fashion, the stropped edge of a razor blade feels sharper when run across the ball of the finger.  So much so that I can tell one edge from the other in a blind test.

Unfortunately, I have no other evidence that this is actually doing anything.  Whatever is happening at the very knife-edge of the steel is far too small for me to see with my crude microscope.  My home-made sharpness tester had too high a variance to tell me much.  And, with one blind shave test, I can’t really feel any difference in shaving.

Edit:  Finally, after 11 shaves with one Personna blade and Barbasol, I judged the shave to be inadequate.  Here’s a contrast of the worn blade and a new blade, after that 11th shave.  You can clearly see that the new edge is perfectly straight, but that the worn edge has quite a ragged appearance. 

(Parenthetically, you can see what a difference shaving cream makes relative to Dove soap.  Unlike my used blades after soap shaving, on this blade there are no huge nicks in the edge, just an uneven razor edge.)

This amount of edge wear is enough to cause me to change to a fresh blade. 

I did my best to see whether or not the blade was any narrower, per my prior experiment in sharpening a blade.  As far as I tell, it’s not. So I’m not wearing out the blade by making it too small to give a good shave. (If that were true, there would be no point in proceeding, because I can’t restore the blade to its original width.)  I’m wearing out the blade by giving it a ragged razor edge.

So, what the heck.  I carefully steeled/honed that worn blade.  Held the blade in my hand, and gave it about ten strokes across the steel, on each edge, flipping the blade with each stroke. 

Below you see two views of the same pair of blades after passing the worn blade over the knife steel.  By eye, the worn edge now appears somewhat less ragged.  Not perfect, but significantly straighter.  Which, I think, is roughly what a knife steel ought to do.  Clean up the very tip of the razor edge of the blade.

I still don’t know if this improved the blade enough that it can still used.  But I’m going to try shaving with it tomorrow.  (Honestly, it’s hard even to be sure that I’m not kidding myself about the steeled edge being straighter.)  Shaving is clearly going to be a subjective test, and if I’d thought about it, I’d have steeled just one edge, so I could do a blind shave test of one edge versus the other.  But that’s water over the dam at this point.

I’ll re-edit this one more time, after I’ve shaved with the worn-and-carefully-steeled blade.

Final edit:  Still doesn’t shave worth a damn.  I have no idea why. 

The blade remains the correct width.  I pulled out a micrometer, and the worn blade is exactly the same edge-to-edge width as a new blade (to within the 0.01 mm resolution of the tool.) 

The blade edge looks good.  Under magnification (with a cheap USB microscope), the blade edge is nice and straight.  I’m hard pressed to tell the used blade from a new blade.

The upshot is that I have no clue why the blade won’t shave.  Possibly the blade wear goes on at a scale that I just can’t see with my current level of magnification?  I hate to leave it like that, but I can’t see any reason why this blade no longer shaves well.  But it doesn’t.

That said, this brings my razor blade deep-dive to closure.  The final question was whether or not there was anything you could do to re-sharpen a stainless-steel blade.  Edit: My answer is, yeah, maybe.  Try using a knife steel.  As of this writing, my answer is no.  As with stropping on leather, I can use a knife steel to clean up the edge, but I can’t make the blade shave well again.

Finally, I am virtually certain that all the methods you may see on the internet, for stropping a razor blade, are simply folklore.  E.g., rub the blade on the inside of a glass, strop it on denim, and so on.  These probably date back to the era of carbon-steel blades.  I’m pretty sure stainless is just too hard (or wear-resistant) for those to work.

Even a proper leather strop merely shined up and cleaned up my blade edge.  It didn’t make it any sharper or better for shaving.  Experts say that you need to use abrasives, if you plan to strop stainless on leather.  My guess is that this is good advice.  But unlike a knife blade, you can’t afford to lose even a smidgen of metal off the edge of a razor blade, or it will no longer function in a safety razor.  So I don’t think abrasives are the answer here.  But I have to note that I have not actually tried loading up a leather strop with the proper stropping abrasive and having at it.

So, the only other object commonly used for cleaning up the edge of a stainless blade, without abrading it, is a knife steel.  Knife steels definitely work on stainless knives.  There’s no reason to think they won’t work on stainless razor blades.

And, near as I can tell, yes, steeling a stainless razor blade in this fashion does something.  Kinda.  I guess?

So with that, I’m calling it a day.

 

Post G23-001: Tomato sauce from frozen tomatoes

One of the joys of gardening is coming across fresh-frozen produce, in the dead of winter, that you squirreled away last summer.

In the Spring of 2022, after determining that freezing was the most energy-efficient way to preserve tomatoes (as long as you have room in an already-running freezer), I froze a bag of early-season “4th of July” tomatoes. Washed them, cut their tops off, put them in a vacuum-sealed bag, and froze them.  (Then sealed the bag, after they had frozen.)

Source:  Post G22-010.

The clincher for me was finding out that frozen tomatoes will slip right out of their skins.  If you’ve every tried to peel a lot of tomatoes, you know what a plus that is.

That’s what I’m doing, in the video above, with the thawed tomatoes.  They already have their tops cut off, they’ve been thawed, and they do, indeed, slip right  out of their skins.

I learned that trick from the blog “from the family with love“.  (You can see her video of peeling frozen tomatoes at this youtube URL).  But, you know, sometimes, there is room for doubt until you actually do it with your own hands.

As a bonus, freezing them (after removing the tops) separates out most of the liquid.  When I pulled the now-thawed tomatoes out of their vacuum-seal bag, roughly half of the output was tomato solids, half was tomato water.

Obviously, after freezing the texture isn’t good enough for eating out-of-hand.  But for a quick batch of tomato sauce, or for adding some chopped tomatoes to a stew, these are fine.  I’m making sauce, so I ran a stick blender through it to pulverize the seeds before reducing it down.

I might even go so far as to say that these are nice.  Compared to canned tomatoes, freezing seems to preserve more of that “fresh tomato” taste. I’m vaguely guessing it preserves more of the aromatics that are lost in canning.

So there you have it.  Wash them, cut the tops off, freeze, then seal the bag their are in.  Thawed half a year later, they are a little taste of summer to enjoy in the dark of winter.

Post #1684: Improved sharpness tester

 

Recall that I’m in the process of testing various internet suggestions for ways to extend the life of a razor blade or disposable shaver.

As part of that, I’d like to have some objective measure of blade sharpness.

One way to test the sharpness of a blade is by measuring the force required to cut a wire or thread.  The sharper the blade, the less force required.

Commercial sharpness testers using this approach cost maybe $200 and up.  That’s a bit pricey, considering that the only use I have for that is to test 10-cent razor blades.

For my initial post in this series, I made my own crude sharpness testers out of washers, super glue, a stout thread, and a kitchen scale.  Like so:

Set the washer on the scale, tare the scale, and see how much downward force is required to cut the thread.

For this round, I decided that a) that was too much work, b) it doesn’t yield enough tests per batch, and c) there are easier and better ways to do this.

Here’s the new, improved sharpness tester.   The principle is the same as the old one:  Make something to hold a thread in place, then cut through that thread while it’s sitting on a kitchen scale.  Use the scale to measure the force required.

But:

First, instead of gluing thread across washers, glue thread to a slotted piece of wood.  In this case, I’m using a little bit of “fluted” commercial trim, about one inch wide, and about a foot long.  Wrap the thread around the trim, spiral-fashion, and glue each piece of thread to the trim.  This way, I get about 20 tests per foot of trim.

Second, instead of holding the blade by hand, rig up something so that you get a steadier cut.  Here, I’m using a scrap piece of steel, some magnets, a bit of duct tape, and some blocks and clamps to make a long, moveable arm to hold the razor blade above the sharpness tester.

To test sharpness, install a blade, tare the scale, position blade above one of the hollows in the trim, and push down slowly until the thread parts.  Try to catch the maximum weight reading on the scale.  (If I were totally serious about this, I’d film the weighing so I could rewind to catch the maximum weight.  As it stands, I just go slowly and do my best to catch the maximum.)

The exact choice of materials doesn’t much matter.  If I hadn’t found that trim, I would have just ripped some slots in a board using a table saw.  If I hadn’t had the steel on hand, I’d likely have used PVC pipe and rigged up something for attaching the saw blade.  All you’re after is something rigid to hold the thread, and something steady to hold the blade.

This surely isn’t perfect.  And the readings in grams are not comparable to what you’d get from a commercial sharpness tester.  But this should be plenty good enough to show that (e.g.) the two edges of a razor blade, treated differently, either do or don’t have the same sharpness.

For sure, if my only other alternative for testing blades is to shave with them, or maybe scrape a fingertip over them, then this is a significant improvement.

Post #1683: The Great Razor Blade Experiment, stopping early for benefit.

 

This is part of an ongoing series to test various internet-based suggestions for extending the life of a razor blade.  You can see the background for this in the Post #1672.  The setup for this experiment is given in Post #1677.  Start of experiment is given in Post #1679 Continue reading Post #1683: The Great Razor Blade Experiment, stopping early for benefit.

Post #1677: Planning the rest of my razor blade experiment.

 

This is part of an ongoing series to test various internet-based suggestions for extending the life of a razor blade.  You can see the background for this in the Post #1672.

I suppose that any group of people obsessed with the minutia of some activity will seem a bit odd to the rest of us. But the more I dive into on-line shaving culture, and on-line blade-sharpening culture, the weirder it gets.

Continue reading Post #1677: Planning the rest of my razor blade experiment.

Post #1676: No-knead’s not news. Easiest home-made bread.

 

Every once in a while, I realize that I’ve been doing something the hard way, all of my life.

Fresh-baked bread is one of those things.

So I thought I’d briefly share this.  This is bread-baking with every corner cut and every possible effort spared. 

The old me would:

  • mix up the dough
  • knead it
  • give it a first proof
  • punch it down
  • ready some bread pans (oil and corn meal)
  • place into bread pans for final proofing
  • bake it

That “standard” bread was pretty good.  But, honestly, any fresh-baked bread is going to be pretty good.

But what a mess to make it.  Kneading, in particular, takes a fair bit of time and effort and leaves residual sticky dough and flour on my hands, on the kneading surface, and so on.  It also requires that you add just the right amount of water to the dough, so that it’s knead-able but not too sticky.

Turns out, you don’t need to knead bread.  I’d seen “no knead” bread recipes, but I figured they were something exotic.  Nope.  This is just the basic King Arthur easiest bread recipe.  Minus the kneading.

The trick is to let it rise overnight, in the fridge.  The “gluten will form” in dough, all on its own.  Kneading just speeds that up.  So if you have the time, you needn’t knead.

More or less any standard bread recipe can be made this way. And, apparently, no-knead’s not news, because you can find this fact any number of places on the internet.  You just have to think to look for it.  Technically, I think the term of art for this is an “autolysed” dough, though there are autolyzed dough recipes that still call for kneading.

Not only is this low effort, it’s low-mess.  Total labor time is maybe ten minutes. There is exactly one dirty dish to wash (the mixing bowl), and three utensils (two butterknives and a tablespoon).  You’ll probably want to rinse the baking pan, and rinse whatever you used to cover the dough in the fridge.  There’s a single piece of parchment paper to toss out.  There’s no flour spilled over the kitchen counter, kitchen floor, clothing, and so on.

This is also an extremely forgiving recipe.  Unlike kneaded bread, the recipe isn’t picky about exactly how much water you use.  A little more, a little less, no problem.  Or exactly how much yeast.  Or what type of bread yeast you use.  Or exactly how long it sits in the fridge.  I usually leave it overnight, but I’ve left it 24 hours and it was fine.

Easiest home-made bread.

Here’s how I now make two loaves of bread. 

  • Mix up some dough using the King Arthur simplest bread recipe:
    • In a large (e.g., four quart) mixing bowl, combine:
      • 600 grams bread flour (typically, just under 5 cups).
      • A tablespoon each of salt and sugar.
      • A scant tablespoon (or one packet) of yeast.
    • Mix the dry ingredients with a butterknife
      • 1-and-2/3rds cups of water.
    • Mix with a butterknife until a dough forms.
  • First proofing.
    • Cover the mixing bowl and leave overnight in the fridge.

 

  • Roll it up
    • Next morning, take the dough out of the fridge.
    • Optionally, let it sit for an hour to warm up a bit.
    • Place a piece of parchment paper on a baking sheet.
    • Oil the top of the parchment paper.
    • Dump out the dough out onto the oiled parchment.
    • Divide in two with an oiled butterknife.
    • Oil your hands and tightly roll each piece into a log shape.*

 

  • Bake it.
    • Lightly oil the surface of each loaf.  (I oil my hands and pat the loaves down.  My hands are already oily from the previous step.)
    • Allow to rise a second time in some warm place.
    • Bake 15 minutes at 425F.
    • Test for done-ness (190F at the center of the loaf), continue baking if necessary.

If you decide to put these into loaf pans, increase the bake time by about five minutes.

* The only part of this that isn’t obvious is what I mean by “tightly roll into a log”.  This step is usually called “tensioning” the dough. Take your lump of dough.  Place oiled fingertips on the narrow edge of the lump. Press down, pull toward you, and roll it up.  Repeat.  Just as tightly as you can manage.  You should end up with a log maybe 2.5″ in diameter, and maybe 10″ long.

I oil the loaves so that I can do the second rise without tightly covering the dough to prevent it from drying out.  As a byproduct, oiling them gives you a soft(er) crust.

Today’s result.

Today’s bread recipe is half-whole-wheat, half-white.  Because that’s all the flour I happen to have left in the pantry.

Here are the loaves just before putting them in the oven, then baked, then showing the crumb of the bread.

I imagine that expert bakers will scoff at this.  You don’t get much “oven spring”.  (Particularly not with whole-wheat flour.)  I don’t bother to slash the top.  It’s not the lightest bread you’ll ever eat.  And so on.

And it doesn’t look as nice as the cartoon bread at the top of this post.

But I view this as a case of diminishing returns.  Sure, you can knead it.  Pat it gently.  Add special herbs and spices.  Whisper sweet words of encouragement to it.  Slash the top before you bake.

And you might get a slightly better loaf of home-made bread, for all of that effort.  Airier crumb.  Crispier crust.  Or whatnot.

But, so what?  This minimal-effort bread is warm, soft, and delicious.  It’s fresh-baked bread.  Without the hassle.  What’s not to like?