Tom the Butcher examines Tinsel

sam-graduation-move-to-tally-tom-portraits-038-150x150Over at the Story Surgeons blog, my friend Tom Shroder has filed an interesting little dissection of Tinsel and what he thinks makes it tick, with a short excerpt. Tom is known to some as Weingarten’s beloved and alternately loathed “Tom the Butcher.” So many of us had the pleasure (seriously, a pleasure, even in tense moments) of being edited by Tom. He conceived of and edited my “Question Celebrity” column in the Washington Post Magazine from 2004-07, and the only thing I miss about that column was getting to gab for a few minutes with Tom once a week as we tried to make sense of, say, Britney’s and Lindsay’s va-jay-jay/limo incidents.

Now beaming with The Glow of recent newspaper retiree, Tom offers his services and advice over on his blog. Check it out — if you have a manuscript or half-written feature (of any length) and want someone to have a professional whack at it, Tom the Butcher will do it, and at very affordable rates. Great editor and also a great writer. And you can read his blog — with musings on the craft — free of charge, since everything in the world now is free of charge.

Also, he filed a funny addendum to his Tinsel post. I remember this lunch! The same sort of thing happened the other day when Dan Zak, Monica Hesse, and I were having a chat about The List (the in/out list; more on that soon) at the Corner Bakery over lunch. The woman next to us couldn’t help interjecting …

>>An add to my post on Stuever’s ability to turn the minutiae of contemporary culture into fascinating repartee. One time Stuever and I had lunch in one of those $18-a-salad restaurants. We had some business to discuss, but I don’t remember what. What I remember is that we very quickly fell into what I always considered the real business of lunch with Hank: a far-ranging discussion of movies, books, celebrity cults, political pretensions, cubicle culture, whatever. About halfway through the entree, a woman dining at the next table leaned over and said: “I’ve never been so entertained by an overheard conversation. I need new friends.”

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