I asked my girlfriend today whether I should write about Glenn Beck being a pandering quack, or the Obama administration’s dissolution of the manned space program, along with my dreams and childhood.

What’d she say? “You know what you should write about? How ugly the uniforms are, and how stupid the big ‘I’ looks.”

I love that girl.

“The colors don’t even match. I went by the ticket office and the soccer team was wearing five different colors. It’s kind of sad when they can’t even afford to buy everyone uniforms at the same time. Maybe they could afford to have a soccer team if they weren’t busy spending money on stupid logos and ugly uniforms?”

Amen sweetie.

Almost three years ago, when he-who-shall-not-be-named was busy running the football team into the ground, athletic director Jamie Pollard announced the changes to our current color scheme and logo. How did we come to this decision? An online poll. Wow. Awesome.

I can’t stand the big maroon “I”, and I’m not sorry. It’s stupid. It misses the point. I could care less if we wore pink or purple uniforms, but let me tell you something about Iowa State:

We’re the frickin’ Cyclones, and not just any ordinary team, oh no.

We’re “The,”  Iowa State, cardinal-with-tornado-pants, Cyclones: the only natural disaster flown by a bird in all of collegiate sports.

There are definitely other natural disaster nicknames in college sports:

There’s a college in Angola, Ind. called Trine. They’re the Thunder, and there are five whole teams that have storm in their name.

There’s the Miami Hurricanes, obviously. Their mascot? An ibis, named Sebastian.

No, an ibis is not a crab, it’s a bird. I guess. But I digress, we’re missing the point: does Sebastian have hurricane pants? He does not.

Geneva, a private Christian college in Beaver Falls, Pa., are known as the Golden Tornadoes. Finally, there are the Tulsa Golden Hurricanes. There is not a hint of urolagnia in there — do not Google that word.

So when the hell did we become the big, stupid I; 2008, I was here for that, mostly.

Why would we do such a thing? Well, Pollard said, “Our coaches also said that when recruiting out of state, most people do not equate our present mark with Iowa State. There is confusion with other schools sharing a similar abbreviation and/or mascot and there is a general disconnect with recruits and people outside of the state’s borders.”

Now, there are 10 other NCAA teams with an I initial in their name, and 20 total in the United States. There is only one, uno, team known as the Cyclones, and their mascot was voted Most Dominant Mascot on Earth. This was a multi-week, nationally-lauded, much, much larger online poll than the one the athletic department put on; but, hey, whatever, let’s change the logo anyway.

A news release on cyclones.com said, “Prior to the creative process, the department did extensive research and found that 72 percent of BCS schools have a letter/s on their helmet, 70 percent adopted their helmet mark as the primary athletics department identity and only 6 percent [including Iowa State] have their mascot in the logo.”

So we’re standing out by fitting in? Because the out-of-state recruits can’t play match-the-logo? That plus an Internet poll? That’s why?

The new font is pretty stupid, too. Has anyone seen the Iowa State University logo at the top of the iastate.edu Web page? Classy, right? That used to be in giant white letters on the stadium that would light up at night and look particularly snazzy. I’ll concede that Mr. Trice deserves to have his name up there, but then they went and plastered that stupid I behind the scoreboard. It looks like someone asked a sixth-grader to design it using WordArt.

Check out the homepage again: is the guy in the middle of the picture wearing the ‘ISTATE’ logo? Nope, that guy is sporting the old-school Cy logo. That guy is awesome.

There’s something endearing about Cy, and nobody wants to hug a letter. You don’t see a giant I beating up Herky at sporting events; although it would be frickin’ awesome to see Cy beating Herky with a giant I at sporting events — can someone make that happen?

I’ll end on a happy note: With apologies to my significant other, the new football uniforms do look pretty sweet. It’s awesome to have coach Paul Rhoads on board, and I’m stoked to stumble around in the student tailgate lot while we win some games.

Know what else? Logo bastardization aside, I think Pollard is a stand-up guy, and has been doing a fine job running the show.

Even if he did hire Benedict Chizik.