This is a community of enthusiasts, hobbyists and artisans who enjoy a traditional wet shave: brush, soap, and safety or straight razor. We are a part of the WetShaving community found on Reddit, Mastodon, Discord, Zulip, and IRC.
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I like it.
Unfortunately I have a soap lined up for Wednesday already because it's a "shave" day for March Madness over the the ole subreddit.
Does it not smell like oil? Because the Strait of Hormuz doesn't, either 👀
Not yet, at least.
As you point out, there is historically much more importance to the Strait than just oil. Nonetheless, my first thoughts for soaps were Gearhead or Midnight Stag. Now, in order to help keep those pesky Fanziners at bay, I’ll have to get creative! (Not my strong suit.)
I have a soap lined up for the 25th as well. Somehow, I need to find a way to relate it to the Strait of Hormuz. That will be a stretch for me since I’m not terribly creative but I’ll manage. Of course if you’re a Fanzine fan, this will not be possible 😂
Ahh. This is a good one! Great idea! And, yes, an obvious choice 😉
Eternal glory
Aren't there normally some virgins involved with this?
Not according to Claude:
Eternal glory comes bundled with several other formulaic "perks" that appear to be reconstructible as PIE inheritance.
The warrior-poet symbiosis
Perhaps the most structurally important: klewos doesn't exist without the singer. The hero needs the aoidos/kavi to immortalize his deeds, and the poet needs the patron's generosity. In Vedic dāna-stuti, the poet explicitly trades imperishable fame for cattle and gold. This creates a kind of transactional immortality economy. The "perk" here is that glory and material reward are inseparable — you don't get one without the other being implicit.
The imperishable drink
Amṛta/ambrosia is another famous isogloss in exactly the same semantic field. In both traditions, consuming this drink is associated with — or occasionally explicitly grants — the immortality that glory gestures toward more abstractly. The hero's fame is imperishable; the gods' bodies are imperishable because ambrosia-fed. These two routes to a-phthito-/a-mṛta- run in parallel.
The beautiful death
Vernant's kalos thanatos: dying young in battle preserves the hero at peak physical beauty forever, whereas surviving to old age means bodily degradation. Glory and physical perfection are thus co-indexed. The Achilles dilemma is precisely about this — a long life means not being forever beautiful and celebrated. Vedic parallels exist in the warrior who dies and joins the gods in his prime.
Post-mortem elevation
In Greece: hero cult, libations, oracular power from the tomb — a localized, concrete immortality alongside the more diffuse fame-immortality. In Vedic: the hero joins the pitṛs or, at the highest register, the devas themselves. Both traditions have a "graduated heaven" where glory in life maps onto status in death.
Divine fellowship during life
The glorious hero gets theoxenia — feasting with gods, divine protection, occasionally erotic attention from goddesses. In Vedic the soma ritual is itself a joint feast of gods and exceptional humans. Glory entitles you to divine company you'd otherwise have no access to.
The package as a whole
What's striking is how consistently these perks cluster: material wealth + poetic immortalization + physical perfection + divine access + post-mortem status. Nagy argues this isn't coincidence — it's a coherent inherited ideology of heroic compensation for the short life. The hero accepts death early in exchange for the whole bundle, whereas the long-lived non-hero gets none of it.
The one thing that varies significantly between the traditions is lineage glory: Greek kleos is more individualistic (Achilles, not the house of Peleus), while Vedic śravas more often accumulates across lineages and dynasties, with descendants perpetuating the ancestor's fame ritually. That may reflect a genuine cultural divergence rather than a difference in the inherited formula.
Fascinating!