Word: haplessness
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...army has never been adequately trained or disciplined. Incidents of random violence have increased in recent months, and some analysts suspect that the army may be out of Obote's control. Underfed and poorly paid, soldiers roam the country in gangs, setting up roadblocks to rape and rob hapless travelers. Funeral announcements on the radio and in the press refer more frequently now to "sudden death," a euphemism used when the deceased has been killed by the army. Says a U.S. expert: "They can't end the guerrilla movement so they seem determined to demoralize it by killing...
...University of North Carolina senior who has won six awards designating him America's best collegian. Born to dunk, he penetrated the zone defenses of opponents to slam at least one goal in each of the eight games. In the first half against hapless Uruguay he hit three dunks and his teammates had three more, vs. eight total field goals of any kind for the Uruguayans. He also hit from outside: in the preliminary game against Spain, he widened a narrow U.S. lead with a 28-ft. shot at the first-half buzzer, and finished the game with...
...gold. After squeaking through quarterfinals in the team pursuit, where four-man squads shift leads to rest in the slipstream, the U.S. cyclists confronted the highly favored West Germans in the semis. The Germans, however, started too fast and lost a fatigued rider; the U.S. lapped the hapless survivors to win. The final, against a blistering Australian squad, saw the tables turned. The U.S.'s Dave Grylls' pedal strap came loose and he dropped out. The remaining Americans, pumping pure adrenaline, could not overcome the Aussies, and settled for silver. The sprint final, though, was all American...
Almost obsessively, Dixon has doomed the protagonist of most of his stories to repeated and often farcical failures in love. Whether named Mac, Jules or Will, he is conspicuously a loser. Speaking with a strikingly distinctive voice, this hapless character is alternately self-pitying and self-mocking, weepily sentimental and stonily sharp-witted. He unceasingly endures abuse, rejection, infidelity, abandonment and most of the other mortifications that can befall a man in the throes of passion...
...terror is terror. Withdraw to the appropriate distance, however, and the spectacle of a society obstinately destroying itself becomes a depersonalized, absurd comedy. The author, an Argentine now living in Mexico, withdraws all the way to Olympus. There Athena and Aphrodite, no less, concern themselves with protecting the hapless members of an apolitical poetry group that meets each week in Buenos Aires. They have been denounced to the police, and a surveillance has been mounted. The dread nether god Hades decrees that twelve of the poets shall be seized by a parapolice murder gang. Can Hades be tricked into abandoning...