Links of the week, 1/13/2012

This week: a near-riot at the symphony, a short history of blind items, and baby sloths!

• Scott Eric Kaufman teaches a course on visual rhetoric and occasionally posts an illustrated essay clearly drawn from one of his lectures. This one on Fight Club is particularly interesting.
• I can’t believe I missed all the drama at the Philharmonic this week when someone’s iPhone rang for more than five minutes during Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and conductor Alan Gilbert finally stopped and waited for the guy to shut the thing off. The New York Times interviewed the perpetrator, whose identity is being withheld, and honestly, I sort of feel sorry for the guy, who sounds like he may have a breakdown over the incident. May we all learn from this! Triple check your phone before concerts!
• I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite character on Community, but Amanda Marcotte makes a good case for Britta, who truly has become a remarkably well-rounded character, an endearingly awkward mess of contradictions in the best possible way.
• I wish I didn’t find this essay on the sausage-making of blind gossip items quite so fascinating.
• A few months ago, some site or another introduced the Internet to the cuteness of baby sloths, and now baby sloth videos turn up all the time, and they are invariably awesome. Who knew baby sloths were so damn cute? In this video, the baby sloths take baths and squeak! Adorable! Yay, baby sloths!