absent-minded

I plan to ask my bank to make a "stop payment." May I require the "absent-minded professor" to reimburse my business for the $25 "stop payment" fee charged by the bank?

"Absent-minded" cystic fibrosis sufferer Gareth Morgan Price forgot to pay for the Tesco lunch worth pounds 2.68, Llanelli magistrates heard.

On February 18, ABC News reported that "guns meant to help safeguard America found their way into the hands of known criminals after absent-minded federal officers left firearms unsecured everywhere from fast-food restaurants to bowling alleys, according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security."

FROM THE BEZPAMENT PEOPLE REPUBLIC MINISTRY OF FOREIGN RELATIONS: "GLOOPEN THE ABSENT-MINDED AMBASSADOR" ...

On the other hand, you may be more absent-minded than you think..

It is a mind-boggling figure - is there a council employee lurking behind every parked car waiting for an absent-minded motorist who forgets to pay and display, or a delayed shopper who over-ran their allotted time?

Instead, she needs to leave for one of her computer jobs, and she sends him to his absent-minded archeologist father.

With all those luminaries executing his bidding, it's impossible not to be won over by this absent-minded professor's Yoda-like passion.

Norwich City's centre-backs appear to have taken a similarly absent-minded approach to their work this season.

That's where one learns that black-lipped pikas (resembling a cross between a guinea pig and mouse) are hardy creatures fundamental to life on the Tibetan plains or that the absent-minded agouti (another rodent) is "the only animal that can break the hard outer shell of a Brazil-nut cluster." Chapters dedicated to shallow seas and ocean depths are particularly eye-dazzling, from hauntingly glowing jellyfish to a two-page spread of sperm whale.

The book's few well-chosen illustrations include the stereotypical portrayal of an absent-minded, egghead professor in an early novel for young adults.

Among his many roles were the judge who sentenced Elvis to prison in "Jailhouse Rock," the prison official who led Susan Hayward to the gas chamber in "I Want to Live," the absent-minded bank president who could never remember the bank vault's combination in Alfred Hitchcock's "Marnie" and the CEO of Pepsi-Cola in "Mommie Dearest."

Larry di Fiori's Jackie And The Shadow Snatcher (0375875158, $15.95) tells of absent-minded Jackie, who's always losing his lunch pail, his math book, and even his shadow or was his shadow stolen?

"At worst," Bensman writes, "he's an absent-minded lunkhead who was unqualified to do the job."

Back in Iraq, meanwhile, the rumpled, absent-minded Makiya keeps cropping up in the narrative, a case study in how visionaries can ignore reality even when it is blowing up around them.