Tom the Butcher examines Tinsel

Over 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.”