This is an indication that my daughter will not be going anywhere with Billy again, this weekend, or any other.
I don’t care if it is the Homecoming Dance.
Is Billy left handed? 
It’s no trick to tell if a person is left handed, though this method *could *tell you on first glance. What’s more interesting is to survey a crime scene and deduce that the killer was left handed.
Well
I thought it was about an oval shaped bruise INSIDE and half way down the throat 
I’m right-handed and wear my watch on the right, and one of my professors is left-handed and wears it on the left.
I’ve also heard that the way one uses a knife and a fork can distinguish Europeans from Americans, but I do it the supposedly European way.
My first job was working at the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans. I worked in an area called the “Italian Village” selling Italian ices and coffee at a place run by Angelo Brocato. There was this huge and ornate cappuccino machine made of brass (or copper, I think) that built up steam to steam the milk. Well, the metal hose where the steam came out protruded at a weird angle and almost everyone who worked there making cappuccinos eventually got a little inch-long scar on their right hand just below the thumb on the back of the hand from the way they had to hold the cup for the steamed milk. So, I could tell who had used one of those antique machines from that little burn scar.
I do too, even though my father always tried to retrain me. I’ve had several Europeans remark on it.
If you ever see a current or former police officer in his short sleeves, there is occasionally a tell tale scarring on their right forearm. Any of us that had a K-9 partner will almost always bear those marks of an old training bite we suffered. I’ve heard tazer training now involves getting zapped for certification, but I don’t know if that leaves a mark, my law enforcement days were long ago.
Archaeologist could tell the handedness of stone age people by looking at
the front teeth.
It was from biting a piece of meat, and cutting it off with a stone knife,
this would leave scratches on the teeth, down and to the left on a right handed
individual, down and to the right on the left handed.
I doubt it would be useful these days.
Seconded. I remember a sf story in which a time-traveling Holmes was frustrated by how mass-produced clothing, shoddy consumer goods and a relative scarcity of people doing manual labor made it much harder to “read” people.
John McPhee wrote Annals of the Former World, which talked at some length about Holmes and his skill at reading geological and soil clues, and a real-life murder case that turned on such evidence. It’s a fascinating book in its own right.
Not Holmesian brilliance by a long shot, and absolutely not anywhere near foolproof, but my experience is that people (other than attorneys and law enforcement personnel) who use the word “incarcerated” rather than the words “in jail,” “In prison” or simply “locked up,” tend to have spent substantial time behind bars themselves. The same goes for people who respond affirmatively to authority figures by saying “Sir, yes sir!” In my callow youth, I thought that was a sign that a person had been in the military. It now appears to me that it is at least equally likely that the person has been to a boot-camp style correctional facility of some sort.
I must disagree.
12 years in the army, three combat tours, 12 months in prison…
No tattoos. Scars, yes, but not from either prison or army. Just life.
IMO, tattoos are for people who want attention, scars are for people who have experience.
I do not need to brag about who/where/what I’ve been. That’s for a lesser person. I’m glad to say I’ve served my time and shut up about it. Buy me a drink, eh?
I didn’t say only people with tattoos have been in prison, I said that guy I helped with a job application last night who had a very crude tattoo of a teardrop under his eye has probably been behind bars and may or may not have killed somebody. At any rate, at some point he certainly wanted people to think he had.
A female coworker has been married for four months, and she is very skinny but has just developed a double chin over the past two weeks. She also refused a cup of tea when I offered her one.
I await confirmation that she is pregnant.
Dave Barry once warned of the dangers of guessing about pregnancies, and said you should not assume a woman is pregnant “until you actually see a baby emerging from her body.”
My brother has one, I don’t. 1969 and 1971.
There’s no damn way I’m going to say anything to her about it…
My wife knew that one of her coworkers was pregnant a month before the coworker did. I think denial may have played a key role in the time lag, however.
I’ll be glad to buy you a drink, UBW, you sound like a wise soul.
I did five years in the Israeli Air Force, and nearly all my IAF brothers, and most sisters sported a distinctive tatoo of their service. I never wanted one, myself. If I ever do, I’m leaning toward the seven color image of Jiminy Cricket on the upper left half of my chest. 
Yeah, it’s not a case of “every person with a tattoo was in prison/the armed forces” or “every person without them wasn’t.” It’s, “there are certain tattoos that either stylistically or thematically strongly correlate to either time spent in prison or the military.”