Sentence examples for pointless attempts from inspiring English sources

Over recent decades, our system has been increasingly distorted by futile and pointless attempts to make state schools look more like private schools.

Some of Mr. Arnold's biggest laughs mined familiar territory: jokes about continuous, ultimately pointless attempts at buoyancy against the tide of his own loserdom — sort of like Charlie Brown's quest to kick the football (professional respect and marital happiness) and Lucy's pulling it away at the last moment (his own character-as-destiny).

My wife's eyes sparkled with the future - oh, that all makes sense now - but the misery of that week, the separate bedrooms, the foursomes for dinner, my desperate, pointless attempts to prove myself still worthy of her, left me hollowed out and broken.

Resuming on 72-6, still needing 22 to avoid being asked to bat again, Aneesh Kapil (41) helped the home side reach 157, their best first innings knock in three pointless attempts this season.

Andrew Lloyd Webber reportedly flew in first class from New York on Monday in an ultimately pointless attempt to bolster the government's numbers in the House of Lords ahead of the tax credits vote.

Like his counterparts in Beijing, Mr Fraser views the pivot as a pointless attempt to contain Chinese influence in the Pacific that will "clearly lead to difficulties between the US and China at some point".

The ultimately pointless attempt at censorship by asking the magazine to paste stickers on a representation of areas controlled by India, Pakistan and China is, sadly, in line with its inflexible and deeply flawed Kashmir policy.

Tobias Ellwood drills holes in the ice - it's about a metre from the snowcrust to the water - and the MPs settle down for a long and apparently pointless attempt to catch supper.

He said: "For him to claim that what is going on Iraq now would have happened anyway, even if the invasion of Iraq had not happened, is a completely pointless attempt to airbrush out what happened 11 years ago and somehow pretend it has got no connection with what is happening today".

Prince William is the British forces' most high-profile officer (we'll come to his brother later), so dispatching him to the islands in this anniversary year was bound to be read as an elaborately pointless attempt to wind up the already wound-up Argentina – and it has predictably succeeded.

Each of them, unable to articulate his frustration, expends it in violence — Deco in the ring, Naldinho in a pointless attempt at a drugstore holdup — but the second half of the movie somehow dilutes, rather than distills, our sense of the men's worldly yearnings.