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Some of my best friends like watching The New Yankee Workshop with Norm Abram. I have watched bits of it, and some parts of it are interesting, but overall I can't stand it and I think the reason  is Norm. I cannot tell you what it is about him that bugs me, but he just drives me nuts.

I just went looking for a link to the show, the search engine selector was set to Wikipedia, and I thought, shoot, let's see what pops up. Well, there's the Wikipedia page, and here's a list of links and one of them goes to the show's website. But what's this? AU, Stop Poisoning Me With Gold? So I have to go look it up, and it turns out to be a "cultural reference" from House:

"It's a complete moron working with power tools. How much more suspenseful can you get?"

 That might explain it.

 I remember talking to a woman I worked with a long time ago, and she was bemoaning the sad state of the dating pool. When I mentioned a man we both worked with, she responded with "Have you ever talked to him? He's a moron", or words to that effect. I never suspected. Of course I hardly ever talked to any of my co-workers anyway.

So maybe it's because my mother taught me to always give people the benefit of the doubt. (Should the last "the" be in there? Should it be just "the benefit of doubt"?) So given enough evidence / rope I will condemn someone for being stupid, but on a short little interaction I won't, except subconciously, I do.

Classifying a stranger's intelligence seems to be something people do almost instinctively. Yet how is it done? How can you judge how smart someone is on a single sentence? And how accurate is it?