Something never understood: see USB storage in CLI & mc

[Ron Leach <ronleach@tesco.net>]

List, good morning,

One aspect of Debian I've never managed to 'get', is how to 'see' any 
temporarily plugged-in USB storage device, from the command line or in 
mc.  The machines in question are using Wheezy.

I often use a machine (with only cli) to download overnight - this 
works well.  But when I insert (say) a 2G or 4G USB storage, I cannot 
'find' any mount referring to the USB storage.

I assume that I have to mount the USB storage, but where should I find 
the reference for the physical device to mount?  Best of all would be 
to make this process 'automatic', if I could.

Not all the devices are formatted with vfat; I think some use ext(x), 
and some are dd'd ISOs.  Because labelling these devices is not very 
practical, I'd like to be able to plug them in and check what they 
contain - before, perhaps, overwriting them with something new.

I'd be interested in how other users organise this but, essentially, 
I'd be grateful for any advice on where to find the physical device to 
use in a mount command.  And, as a secondary question (there are two 
points on offer for this one), how to mount it without knowing the 
device's fs.

regards, Ron