holy cow, ianzin replied to my post
thanks for everyone’s help; just as the thread wandered, i was actually looking for ways to spot it being done on me and the signposts, patter, etc., but i didn’t want to ask it that way so that i would get “realer” replies. thanks everyone.
On the WWW, you can find raw transcripts of various TV shows with “Psychic” guests who are either doing cold reading or something amazingly like it. Here is one such transcript of a James Van Praagh performance on the Larry King show, somewhat skeptically annotated.
If you do a search on SDMB, you will find several long and recent threads devoted to this topic.
You will find the “twenties” scam described in detail in a book (32 pages, more of a pamphlet, really) called The Change Raisers, by W. M. Tucker.
In one episode of Cheers, Harry “The Hat” Anderson pulled this on one of the bartenders. A joy to watch such skill.