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I saw They Might Be Giants for the I-don’t-know-how-manyth time. I know this is a synonym for “I was smart and unpopular in high school,” but there you have it.

TMBG now has two sets of fans: first, a couple of decades worth of former geeky teens (around here we call them “Microsofties”) and children whose parents know their kids have to listen to poppy, repetitive songs, and have chosen the most cerebral ones of the bunch. For each group, they have a set. How to tell them apart: if the show starts before 8, or occurs at a park or zoo, it’s a kids’ show. This one was at the Woodland Park Zoo.

It is in this environment where the lines of division are drawn. Some of the grown-ups stand up and dance around to 1990’s “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” Then a few songs from later albums. And then, “No!”, a song from a kids’ album they did, causes everyone under 6 to start dancing maniacally, and the rest of the crowd to sit perfectly still. The effect is analogous to running a low-pass filter over the audience. (It takes a geek term to describe a geek crowd.)

In both sets, however, they appear to have completely given up on their earlier catalog, which completely bums me out, and only partially because it makes me feel old. Their first two albums, They Might Be Giants and Lincoln, are loaded with more lyrical twists than Kool Keith after a brick of lush, funky weed. All while doing some really trailblazing work with sound which has since become commonplace. Both are works of art, but especially Lincoln. If you don’t own it, stop reading now and pick it up. (Okay, you can finish this post, but that’s it.)

It is in the spirit of the grown-up geek-rockers in the crowd that I present this, the ten best lines in TMBG’s Lincoln album:

• Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn’t thinking, isn’t thinking of.
• The yellow Roosevelt Avenue leaf overturned. The order of arboreality is an adventure we have spurned.
• I don’t want the world. I just want your half.
• People should get beat up for stating their beliefs.
• Life is a placebo masquerading as a simile.
• They’ll need a crane to take the house he built for her apart. To make it break is gonna take a metal ball hung from a chain.
• They’re searching the yonder blue. They look out for #2. The heraldry of the pencil rain.
• Money’s all broke, and food’s going hungry.
• I set my sail so long ago, they’ve revoked my sailor’s patch.
• Now you’re the only one here who can tell me if it’s true: that you love me, and I love me.