In a world where we so often judge by appearance, for instance, there is perhaps a virtue in promoting these pitiful creatures that is also consistent with a logo, opening parade and metal tower which promise to make the London games the ugliest in Olympic history.
This may have been the most significant Ayrshire derby in history but it was also one of the ugliest.
It's getting a facelift soon, but for now it remains the grim, dirty-looking building that once saw it voted among the ugliest in Bristol.
Brexit might be the ugliest word in the entire history of language – managing to simultaneously sound like the name of a minor multinational adhesives conglomeration and the noise you make when you barf three litres of semi-digested Weetabix into a metal colander – but that hasn't stopped the prospect of an EU referendum from dominating the news cycle.
"America supports the bogus Zionist regime which is a terrorising state and that's the ugliest form of supporting terrorism," he said.
And we were called "the ugliest band in pop" by Elton John.
Last year's triumphant winner of the Carbuncle Cup, awarded for the ugliest building of the year, was another staggeringly misjudged student housing scheme, where a 350-room complex was built behind the teetering frontage of a 19th-century warehouse on -London's Caledonian Road.
The sector, perhaps one of the handiest gauges of global economic expectations, has seen several false dawns with the summer slump being the ugliest, but the prospect of a flurry of deal-making would be just the ticket to draw attention away from the ongoing decline in commodity prices.
In October 2014 the Times of India reported that the bribes required to clear the various stages of the planning-permission process in central Mumbai could add up to as much as half of basic building costs.Audio and Video content on Economist.com requires a browser that can handle iFrames.The ugliest effect of the return of land, though, may be the brake it applies to the economy as a whole.
It was voted the ugliest town in Britain, but I look at it enviously.
Instead, preparations for the games have degenerated into some of the ugliest verbal confrontations for years between China and its critics.
