EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 10

Heat 9 was a close race, so it falls to me to cast the deciding vote for the United States Postal Service to continue on to Round 2. Here are the Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Scissors
Google.com
Sex
US Postal Service

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Velvet Underground's four studio albums, iPod/iTunes
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola
OTHER: shoes, eBay.com, Mapquest.com, Weather.com, money, power, fame, that picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird, righteous indignation

The next four contestants, please:



1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien | And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness. (N.B. You are voting for the books here, not the movies.)




2. Lawrence of Arabia, directed by David Lean |
Potter: Ooh! It damn well hurts!
Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.
Officer: What's the trick then?
Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.




3. Chocolate-chip cookies | Delicious and nutritious!




4. The Sopranos |
Tony: You know, there's this Russian woman. She told me something that's very true. She said, only here, in America, do we expect to be happy. I mean this woman, she had a terrible leg disease since she was 9. She was dirt poor. She's getting on with her life. I mean, over here, we come and we bitch to shrinks. I mean, what the fuck?
Dr. Melfi: Well, part of that may be true. But who said that after getting out of the dirt and the poverty, do we have to stop looking for truth and happiness?
Tony: Truth and happiness? Come on, I'm a fat fucking crook from New Jersey. What truth and happiness?

Polls close Monday, August 2 at midnight.

In related news: Maggie Gyllenhaal goes to Target.

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 9

Sex handily beat out money (its only real contender), fame and power in Heat 8 to continue on to Round 2. Here are the Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Scissors
Google.com
Sex

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Velvet Underground's four studio albums
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola
OTHER: shoes, eBay.com, Mapquest.com, Weather.com, money, power, fame

The next four contestants, please:



1. The fourth-gen iPod (the whole iPod/iTunes experience, really, but just look at that new iPod) | Can't...stop...drooling...




2. That picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird | Cooler than any of us can ever even dream of being. (N.B.: A vote for this is a vote for this specific photograph, not for Cash's music, which will get its shot at the title at a later date.)




3. Righteous indignation | Makes you feel good! Yeah! Get worked up over something trivial! It's your right!




4. The U.S. Postal Service | UPS can suck it.

Polls close Monday, July 26 at midnight.

I've got nothing interesting to say about music today, and my writing time is occupied with working on a script for a short film and getting comics stuff ready for San Diego this weekend. Remember to vote in the latest heat of Everything Idol. That is all.

Also: A magic blog gnome has updated the archives, so now you can read the entire Lil' Gardner & Robot Jesus saga from the beginning!

SPINE/SCREEN | Random thoughts

Blogger's down, work's long, Gardner's lazy. Ergo, you get me thinking out loud:

1. In this poorly-researched article, Marvel writer Mark Millar makes the observation that Superman and Jesus look kinda alike: “The similarities between Superman and Jesus are huge. You’ve got a guy who came from a star in the sky to perform miracles, was born to parents who weren’t his natural parents – Jonathan and Martha Kent instead of Mary and Joseph.” Hardly the most original thought in the world, but it got me thinking about all the other epic fantasy heroes who were orphaned and then raised by foster parents: Batman, Spider-Man, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Frodo. I'm sure there are plenty more. Are they all just riffing on Jesus, or is there something more primal at work here? (Sorry if you've heard this all before; I'm sure Joseph Campbell has examined this to death, but I just thought it was interesting.) What's more interesting is that the three comic-book superheroes whose stories have resonated most strongly with a mass audience--Superman, Batman and Spider-Man--are all orphans. These are the characters who have transcended comics to become multimedia icons, while the Flash, Green Lantern (both given their powers as adults, at least the Silver Age versions) and Wonder Woman (I'll give you a dollar if you can tell me her origin) haven't. What is it about a child losing his parents and becoming a hero that resonates so strongly? And does this have anything to do with "Anti-Dad" in Seaguy?

2. Three of the Fantastic Four have been cast, and now there's a rumor that Sarah Wynter (from 24) is going to play Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman. While Wynter, at 31, is a better choice than Elisha Cuthbert to play the maternal-yet-sexy Storm, if they were gonna go for a 24 alum, I wish they'd have picked Laura Harris, who played psycho blonde Islamist terrorist Marie Warner, sister of Wynter's character:



But the casting for Ben Grimm, aka The Thing, is right on: Michael Chiklis from The Shield, my current Netflix obsession. The strange thing is, less than five years ago, Chiklis wouldn't have been in the running at all--he was still starring in awful sitcoms like Daddio instead of burning drug dealers' faces on stovetops. This is Chiklis now, looking very Thing-esque:



And this is Chiklis when he was starring in The Commish in the early '90s:



Not exactly superhero material. So this is proof that shaving your head is the best thing ever (okay, losing 50 pounds probably helped too), but I was surprised to discover, via IMDB, that Chiklis is only 40 years old. It's not that he looks older than that, it's that he already looked that age thirteen years ago when he was playing the Commish--and he would have only been in his late 20s when he started doing that. I never watched that show, so my one pre-Shield exposure to Chiklis was a Seinfeld episode where he played an annoying houseguest, but even that was enough to give me an idea of just how drastic a shift in persona The Shield was for him. How many other actors have managed such a shift? (Not a rhetorical question--I'm genuinely curious.)

UPDATE: Spoke too soon--Jessica Alba has been cast as Sue Storm.

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 8

Another close race: Watchmen tied with scissors in Heat 7, so they'll both continue on to Round 2. Here are the Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Scissors
Google.com

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Velvet Underground's four studio albums
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola
OTHER: shoes, eBay.com, Mapquest.com, Weather.com

Voting was curiously subdued in the last heat, so maybe this lineup will spark more discussion:



1. Money | Can be used to purchase power, sex and fame.




2. Power | Makes it easier to acquire money, sex and fame.




3. Sex | If employed properly, can be exchanged for money, power and fame.




4. Fame | Makes others more willing to give you money, power and sex.

Voting closes Monday, July 19 at midnight.

EVERYTHING IDOL UPDATE

Only seven votes so far? And the polls close in fourteen hours? Come on, people. I don't want scissors to win this round.

Go vote now.

SPEAKER | Pop Quiz


Good. You know your music. You should be able to
work at Championship Vinyl with Rob, Dick and
Barry


Do You Know Your Music (Sorry MTV Generation I Doubt You Can Handle This One)
brought to you by Quizilla

So according to this music quiz I'm some sort of rock 'n roll savant. Well, we all already knew that, but frankly this quiz is so easy that the High Fidelity guys would probably mock its creator mercilessly in the unlikely event that reality merged with their fictional world, thereby allowing them to meet.

But for those of you eager to test your knowledge of rock history and thereby gloat over your less-informed friends, this quiz is much more comprehensive and difficult. It doesn't provide the answers, but I think I can confidently answer 25-30 of its 50 questions without resorting to research materials. Not exactly Championship Vinyl material, but still respectable. Let's look at a few of the questions:

3. One of producer Sam Phillips' earliest successes at Sun Records was a No. 1 R&B hit recorded by Jackie Brenston with the Delta Cats in March 1951. Brenston was a sax player in Ike Turner's Band. The song was named after a big American car. Name that tune.

That would be "Rocket 88," named after the Oldsmobile Rocket Hydra-Matic "88" and regarded by some--mainly Phillips himself--as the first real rock 'n roll song. In Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll, Nick Tosches writes a brief, fascinating chapter on Brenston and his one claim to fame. Here's how Tosches describes "Rocket 88," which he marks as "an embarking from the rock-'n'-roll of the 1940s towards a brave new world of pegged pants, filtered cigarettes, and Medalo Bops":

The overcharged amplification of Willie Kizart's electric guitar, the careening glissandi and manic triplets issuing from Ike Turner's piano...Raymond Hill's post-melodic saxophone shriekings, Willie Sims's trash-can drumming, and the raw heartfelt degeneracy of Jackie Brenston's singing, shouting, and yelping--the whole of these parts was a sound so loudly and luridly shocking, so preposterous in its celebration of booze, broads, and repossessed cars, that it was difficult to perceive where its brilliance ended and its lunacy began.

"Rocket 88" was as high as Brenston ever got. He was just a stepping stone on Ike Turner's rise to stardom and on rock 'n roll's path to cultural dominance. "They did not know, these people, what can happen to a man when his dreams of riding in style are repossessed; they did not know," writes Tosches. "He took a drink, he took another. The warm days ended, the cold days came. He awoke in a room at the Kennedy V.A. Hospital in Memphis. The Army, at least, had been good for something. He died there, on December 15, 1979. Just a ride there and a walk back. That fame shit sure drove a hard bargain."

"Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats

The one album you find when you search for "Jackie Brenston" on Amazon

39. Minneapolis post-punk band Hüsker Dü changed the course of rock 'n' roll with such seminal mid-'80s albums as "Zen Arcade" and "New Day Rising." The band's tumultuous inner life - which included an intense rivalry between drummer/singer Grant Hart and guitar god Bob Mould, drug and alcohol addiction and the suicide of manager David Savoy - led to a messy and much-lamented breakup in 1988. Name Hüsker Dü's last recorded hurrah.

Their last album was 1987's double-album monstrosity Warehouse: Songs and Stories, but their final tour is documented on The Living End, released in 1994. Thanks to the thin sound on their original albums, The Living End is probably the best example of just how ferocious the Dü were--the album's main lesson is that intra-band strife makes you really fuckin' awesome on stage--and how influential they continue to be (Kim Deal famously joined the Pixies after Black Francis put out an ad looking for a bassist "into Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary"). Songwriting and singing duties were split pretty much evenly between drummer Grant Hart and guitarist Bob Mould (fun fact: Mould wrote "Dog on Fire," The Daily Show's theme song); here, from The Living End, is one of handlebar-mustachioed bassist Greg Norton's few contributions, a raging, churning portrait of desperate infatuation that he more growls than sings.

"Everytime" by Hüsker Dü

Also: where they got their name.

47. What do English avant-rockers Radiohead and Southern literary genius William Faulkner have in common?

This one stumped me for a bit, until I realized the obvious: they're both from towns named Oxford, one in England and one in Mississippi. I have been to neither.

"I Have Not Been to Oxford Town" by David Bowie

From Bowie's 1995 futuro-art-detective-noir concept album, Outside. Outside is largely a failed experiment, full of not-fully-realized characters with names like "Algeria Touchshriek," a vague plot about a conceptual-art murder, and lots of boring semi-musical interludes. There are, however, a few good songs buried in the mix, including today's selection, which grooves along on a bouncy nerd-disco bassline and a compulsively singalongable chorus. Outside also marked Bowie's flirtation with Nine Inch Nails-style industrial dance--cf. "The Heart's Filthy Lesson," which was used in the end credits of Seven, and whose Samuel Bayer-directed video first made me think that Bowie should play the Joker in a film version of The Dark Knight Returns.

Also: Get better, David.

"William Faulkner in Hollywood" by Tom Russell

Probably one of the best songs ever written about how Hollywood can destroy people who aren't prepared for its realities; almost certainly the best song ever written about Faulkner. From Road to Bayamon; there'll be more about Russell here in the future, maybe.

Tom Russell's website

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)

Because postponing the election won't "disrupt the democratic process"

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. officials have discussed the idea of postponing Election Day in the event of a terrorist attack on or about that day, a Homeland Security Department spokesman said Sunday....

Ridge warned Thursday that al Qaeda terrorists were planning a large-scale attack on the United States "in an effort to disrupt the democratic process."

That damn Emmanuel Goldstein! Why won't he just let us vote in peace?

My eighth-grade self would've killed for this

Pentrix: Pen Spinning Revolution!

Apparently, the compulsive pen manipulation I've been doing since I learned how at the Barkley Forum in 1993 is the 360 Degree Normal. Now I've gotta learn the Reverse, which has bedeviled me since debate camp that same year--my roommate Shatul could do continuous forwards and reverses without even trying. I hated him for it.

Link via Grammarporn.

SPINE | Quickly now

Astonishing X-Men #1-2 by Joss Whedon, John Cassaday & Laura Martin
The first issue of the new flagship X-Men title, while gorgeously illustrated and pleasant enough, was hardly up to the standard set by Grant Morrison on New X-Men. The new/old costumes looked stupid, and Whedon's explanation of them (via Cyclops) wasn't much better: "We're superheroes, and superheroes wear costumes, so we're wearing costumes. Durh." (Paraphrasing, but still.) But with the fourth-wall-breaking out of the way, Whedon really hits his stride in the second issue. His dialogue is as sharp as his best Buffy work, and the dual plots he's setting up--a deadly, arrogant invader from something called "Breakworld," and a geneticist who claims to have discovered a cure for the "mutant disease"--are intriguing. Cassaday, with assistance from best-colorist-in-the-biz Martin, draws the action with a choreographer's eye for violence, an architect's eye for the use of space, and a cinematographer's eye for drama. Even the costumes are starting to grow on me. (Except Wolverine's. Still stupid.) Cyclops's body condom actually looks okay with the cowl worn down like a hoodie, and Beast's I'm-a-big-boy pull-up pants are so goofy they're kind of cool, especially in conjunction with the overgrown-Himalayan look Cassaday's given him. I wish sometimes that Martin's colors weren't so painterly, because they hide Cassaday's intricate linework, but that's a minor complaint. This is one of the best-looking comic books on the stands.

Astonishing X-Men is a book of superficial pleasures, and so far the surface is clever and pretty enough that it's okay. There's been no hint of the layers of subtext that Morrison brought to the franchise, aside from the clumsy handling of the costumes. But Whedon clearly knows where he's going with this, and the second issue is enough of an improvement over the first that there's no reason not to stick around to see if he breaks that surface.

Perhaps more, on Spider-Man 2 and Ultimate Fantastic Four #7-8, as the day progresses. I'm sleepy.

Shameless

I'd just like to point out that my birthday is this Friday.

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 7

Ping-Pong tied with Dr. Strangelove in Qualifying Heat 6, so they'll both continue on to Round 2. Here are the Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola
OTHER: shoes

Now, to find out which wonderful thing will continue on its journey toward becoming Best Thing Ever:



1. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons | Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!" and I'll look down and whisper "No." They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men who believed in a day's work for a day's pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and Communists and didn't realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don't tell me they didn't have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers...and all of a sudden, nobody can think of anything to say.




2. The Velvet Underground's four studio albums: The Velvet Underground & Nico, White Light/White Heat, The Velvet Underground and Loaded | "Only five thousand people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every single one of them started a band." - Brian Eno, allegedly




3. Scissors | Cutting thing: easier than tearing things. Speaking of which...




4. Edward Scissorhands, directed by Tim Burton | Dude! Scissors! For hands!

Polls are open until midnight on Monday, July 12.

EVERYTHING IDOL UPDATE | Vote now!

Ping-Pong has pulled ahead of Dr. Strangelove in Qualifying Heat 6 with less than seven hours to go. Vote now, if you haven't already, particularly if you're a Beatles or Joseph Heller fan.

SPEAKER | Fairfax Jukebox



1. A new Fiona Apple track has leaked; go to Fluxblog to download "Extraordinary Machine" and read all about why her new album might not get released. Hopefully Sony'll pull a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot so we can hear this album sooner rather than later, because this is a fantastic song. Her second album was a marked improvement over her first, which was pretty damn good to begin with, and if "Extraordinary Machine" is any indication, her continued collaboration with producer Jon Brion is yielding fantastic results. (I'm assuming Brion produced the new song. It sure sounds like his stuff.) Brion is probably my favorite producer; he's also worked with Rufus Wainwright and Aimee Mann and scored Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love (Anderson dated Apple for a while, and directed a couple of great videos for her). Brion's at the center of this little group of like-minded artists, and the LA club Largo, where Brion has a Friday-night residency, is their home base.

Brion's chief gift as a producer and composer is his ability to make music that sounds both old and new, both slick and handmade. His arrangements are full of little orchestral curlicues, and they sound theatrical--the music tells a story by itself--without bombast. His work on Magnolia, all ominous strings and hopeful brass, is very different from his restless, percussive score for Punch-Drunk Love, but they're both recognizably Jon Brion scores. His work is the musical equivalent of the films of another Anderson: Wes, director of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. It's comfortably eccentric.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Theme" by Jon Brion (buy the soundtrack)
Awkward and lurching, like the romance in the film. Fragments of melody like broken memories.

"Showtime" from Magnolia by Jon Brion (buy the score)
Music for corridors. Insistent, but not menacing. Following, but not chasing.



2. Comedian Patton Oswalt is another member of that Largo group. He appeared in Magnolia as doomed blackjack dealer/scuba diver Delmer Darion, went on tour with Aimee Mann and Michael Penn, and performs at Largo on a regular basis. He just released his first album, Feelin' Kinda Patton, which was recorded last September at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, GA. Oswalt is one of the best stand-up comedians working today, if not the best--if you want to know why, just listen to his album. If you've seen him live a few times, you've probably heard most of the material, but that doesn't make it any less funny; and if you haven't seen him perform, then the album will probably cause you bodily harm. It's just that good.

I would direct you to my interview with Oswalt from just before the album was recorded, but Flagpole is having technical difficulties at the moment.

Two tracks from the album are available for free on his website. Here's another one, which I decided to share because I'm 99% sure that's Mail Clerk cackling appreciatively at the 1:20 mark.

"My Christmas Memory" by Patton Oswalt

If you haven't gotten the point already, here's where you can buy the album:
Amazon
United Musicians



3. Brion played vibes on a few songs on Elliott Smith's XO, and though he doesn't appear on "Independence Day," its melding of confessional songwriting and lush arrangement has more than a little in common with Brion's work. Enjoy your holiday, those of you who don't have some important work project due on Thursday.

"Independence Day" by Elliott Smith

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)

MICROFICTION | Catalog

(1) 1992 Honda Civic, silver
Left front tire flat
Bullet (.45 caliber) embedded in dash
Front bumper missing
Two right doors dented, scraped, unopenable
Trunk dented, unopenable
Airbag discharged, minor blood spatter on airbag

Contents of vehicle:
(1) copy The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, softcover (inscribed "Sunshine--this will CHANGE YOUR LIFE keep on truckin', Dylan")
(1) copy Eurythmics Greatest Hits, cassette, in The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan case
(2) cans "Cheezums" flavor Pringles potato chips, empty
(1) "Vanilla Blossom" car air freshener
(5) bottles Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, empty
(1) bottle Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, unopened
(1) bottle Popov vodka, half-empty
(1) shoe, Nike, white, women's size 7
(1) fingernail, embedded in driver's side door armrest
(1) strip of flannel cloth, caught on driver's side door handle
(1) duffel bag, olive green, with ID tag: "Robin Chamberlain Dylan Harding, 10700 Olympic, LA, CA 90064"

Contents of duffel bag:
(7) pair women's underwear, cotton
(2) pair Wrangler jeans, women's size 4
(5) tank tops, white, women's size small
(1) pair sandals, Birkenstock, women's size 7
(1) flannel shirt, red plaid, men's size large
(1) toiletry bag, leather

Contents of toiletry bag:
(1) bottle Feria hair color, Platinum Blonde, empty
(1) pair scissors
(1) baggie marijuana, approx. 1 oz.
(1) lock of hair, brown, length 5 inches
(1) wedding band, gold, inscribed "Dylan & Sunshine forever"
(1) human finger, male