QA Vampire a Day: Christmas with the Vampire by Shay Roberts. FREE!!

Yes, the season is over, but isn't Christmas a state of mind? Christmas with the Vampire  is a novelette set in Prague with a backdrop of a medieval town nearby. It's a fun take on the Santa Claus myth and a nice coming-of-age tale. It's available free on Kobo and Amazon.

Month of Streaming Netflix: Butter

It's been a pretty good year so far at the Tomlinson household but I still feel like I'm geting nickel and dimed to death by monthly fees for this and that. I keep coming back to that $9.95 a month Netflix subscription. Month to month, it's not that big a deal but over the course of a year it adds up to $119.40 and I have to wonder, is it worth it? Soemtimes when I log onto Netflix in search of an aafternoon's entertainment, it seems like the only thing available is several season's worth of How I Met Your Mother and the Adam Sandler movie Anger Management. (It reminds me of the early days of HBO where Bill Murray's movies Scrooged and Ghostbusters seemed to be in heavv rotation with precious little on offer. (I confesss I think  "the Night the Reindeer Died," the  Christmas movie pitch sequence from Scrooged with Lee Majors saving Santa Claus is pretty hilarious, but I digress.)

I decided to see if I could find a month's worth of Netflix streaming movies that would entertain and engage me enough to convince me that keeping the subscription is worth it.  Movie #1 is Butter, starring Jennifer Garner. I like Garner. I thought she was terrific in the unerrated romantic comedy Catch and Release (which featured a wonderful supporting turn by filmmaker Kevin Smith). I wasn't as charmed by 13 Going on 30 (a female version of Big) but that wasn't her fault. She could probably spend the next decade doing the kind of movies Sandra Bullock made early in her career and that would be fine. But she's not really playing it safe, and I like that. (I cannot wait to see her in Draft Day, which is the movie Moneyball wanted to be.)

Butter is the kind of quirky little movie that hits theaters for a week and then disappears. It's got a great cast. In addition to Garner, there's Olivia Wilde and Hugh Jackman but the subject of the comedy--competitive butter sculpting--is so nutball that you're surprised the movie wasn't some USC film student's thesis project. (It made a grand total of $175,700 at the box office, and that's counting global ticket sales.) The movie remnded me a lot of the Nicole Kidman film To Die For. My favorite performance in the movie was probably Olivia Wilde, playing a slutty sculptress who enters the contest just to mess with people.

Butter sculpting is a real thing, by the way, with its own Wikipedia entry and everything..

butter was fun, so that's a plus for Netflix.