Word: haplessness
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...Lampoon claims that the repeated false alarms at the castle have been due to a faulty fire alarm. (Although, of course, that wouldn't explain the burnt newspaper the fire investigator found after the May 16 call to the 'Poon.) The Lampoon's current predicament is funny, in a hapless, pathetic kind of way, but their antics aren't so grave that the editor of the magazine deserves to have a police record for arson for the rest of his life. A criminal prosecution in an attempt to make an example out of Hely and the 'Poonsters is neither warranted...
...foolish situations and come out with pictures that are more complicated than satire. In the same way, she can work among people in painful circumstances and make tender but dry-eyed summations of their predicaments. The characters in her pictures can be simultaneously comical and admirable, sinister and hapless, strange and familiar. You never know entirely what to make of them. She wouldn't want...
Trickle-down economics has not yet sunk to the places that the people in George Saunders' fiction must, for want of a better fortune, call home. The hilariously hapless heroes of the six stories in Pastoralia (Riverhead Books; 188 pages; $22.95) live as adults with their crotchety mothers or religiously obsessed sisters or a menagerie of squabbling relatives. The beleaguered breadwinner in Sea Oak works as a male stripper at Joysticks, a club with an aviation motif, and notes of his lodgings, "At Sea Oak there's no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear...
...harsh right angles and rigid grid layout so despised by hapless cubicle-ites are also likely to vanish. In their place, workers might find themselves in a tentlike structure with a retractable roof, pitched right in the middle of a vast, open commons area. Screens stretching from poles could shift from transparent to opaque, depending on your mood and need for privacy. Don't worry about the noise from your next-door neighbor; acoustics technology can block that out. And don't fret about fighting for a windowed office either; with walls of flat-screen monitors raining down images...
...completely fed up with Dilbert. He's funny. He's unerringly on the money. But he's a hapless victim too. Damned if I'm going...