Tip 112: Divide people into "tribes"

Plucked, vacant leg follicles?  file under R for Roadie
Ankle in the gap between the rolled up chinos and the brogues, where sock ought to be? File under H for Hipster.
Strappy high heels and calf tone to spare? Under C for cyle chicstress.
Filthy Vans and vast expanses of visible boxer short? B for BMX bandit.
A grown man riding a second hand mountain bike in workman's clothes? Look away.

BONUS TIP: Send your boy for another gin and tonic while you work on your treatise - a complete anthropology of cycling tribes, coming out under Pith Helmet Publishing this spring.

Tip 104: Give the bird

Compared to consigning your enemies to years of sensory deprivation broken up only by CIA officers doing weird stuff to their junk, giving someone the bird seems pretty mild as far as 21st century retribution goes. 
But - when given with a full arm motion - it is almost as satisfying as denying someone's rights.

BONUS TIP: If anyone in the cycling community has a secret service with or without aircraft, owns land in which the status of law is unclear, or is open to holding dangerous motorists in morally dubious circumstances please leave contact details below and we'll see if we can hook something up.

Tip 101: Ride on the sidewalk

You are not a criminal. You endorse taxation, smile at police officers and keep your beard neatly trimmed. You read the world news section as you patiently wait for your morning espresso. You play it straighter than a gay 18 year old home for Christmas.
But sometimes a citizen *has* to ride on the sidewalk. A bike-lane went all Houdini on you.  It's safer than salmoning. It's faster.  Whatever.
So you take a little walk on the wildside. 
Look out.
You might catch your handlebar in the apron of a waiter delivering chicken soup to pavement diners, and end up being punched by a hungry mob while wallowing in broth.
You might have a little tete-a-tete with a car exiting a driveway.
You will certainly meet the quiet assassins: cross streets. The more insignificant the street, the more likely its gutters are precipices. Unless your frame is made of composites taken from a stoner's beanbag, you're gonna feel that jolt all the way up your spine.

BONUS TIP: Worse than cross streets is cross pedestrians.  Noone knows when the foot-borne tribes got up to scratch with the law, but many are aware bicycles are vehicles under the law. They will recite statutes, lecture in shrill voices, grasp at your clothing. Nod sagely but don't dismount. You're not a criminal, remember?

Tip 98: Crime Spree

You're Ned Kelly, on a crime spree. 
Break one law, just makes you want to break another.
In one ride you've racked up enough demerit points to take every licensed driver off the roads, enough fines to pay back the national debt.
The police have just one problem.  They're not fast enough to catch you.

BONUS TIP: After the judge sees how many one-way streets you rolled through, you'll probably end up on death row.  Riding the bike you made out of soap round the exercise yard, waiting and waiting for that pardon to arrive, you'll stare down at your crude prison-cell cycling tattoos and your perfectly sculpted quadriceps, and yearn for the freedom to stop at a stop sign.

Tip 91: Fall in love with your bike path

It's got some dead leaves on it.
You love those leaves.
There's grass growing through a crack.
You love that grass, and you love the crack for giving that grass a chance.
There is some gravel on it.
You think the right amount of gravel is to the perfect bike path as the right amount of vegemite is to the perfect piece of toast.
It goes under a freeway, which is the finest rendering of the brutalist design theory you can imagine.
It has the *most* delectable series of gentle lefts and sweeping rights.
And sometimes there are birds flying around freely, as though this is a symbolic diorama made by a creator figure, and you a smiling, bicycle-riding creature made of pipe cleaners.

BONUS TIP: Treat that skinny strip of tarmac with respect and affection. Next time you are riding, take a moment. Dismount, sit down, and ask how it feels.  Then listen - really listen - to what it says.

Tip 89: Swallow a fly

Good vegans ride round with their mouths shut, but the rest are in danger of swallowing a fly at some point. 
When it happens - gag, cough, spit - remember the green goo in the middle of a fly is 100 per cent protein. If you forgot to pack your energy bars, scooping up a juicy blowfly could power you up the next hill.

BONUS TIP: Try not to get obsessed with finding a spider to swallow next. Who knows where that might end.  

Tip 88: Change into your easiest gear

Putting it in the granny gear on a hill is like visting a dangerous third world city and spending the day in your five-star hotel room.
It's easy! It's pleasant! So stress free! I feel like I'm wasting my life!

BONUS TIP: Many of God's lightning bolts are aimed at lower-end Shimano derailleurs, at the moment the user goes to shift back up. 
The unfortunate mortal is then stuck riding around town with their legs spinning like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character just before they shoot off in a cloud of dust.

Tip 84: Ride without fenders

Get a clean lean look on your ride and a back-end bespangled with mud-sequins, all in one fluid motion. 

BONUS TIP: Coincidentally, that brown stripe up your back will look a little like a fluid motion. As though you squirm through the sewers like a Ninja Turtle. That would be athletic, even daring. But is it Cycle-Chic?

Tip 76: Make someone go "woah"

Many people think a bicycle is like a merry-go-round horse: great fun but not much chop for travel. 
Arrange to meet one of them somewhere far away. Rock in wearing jeans and a knit, and hang your helmet on the back of the chair.
They'll go: "Wait. You *rode* here? woah!"

BONUS TIP: At the end of the event you will have to defend yourself from many offers of putting your bike in a car and being driven somewhere. 
Your duties are two-fold. First, decline all offers, feigning indifference to the weather's inclemency. Second, do not crash on the way home. 

Tip 74: Get stupid

Riding a bike can be just like drinking liquor.
You feel amazing, right up until you do something you regret. Something you would never do.
A dangerous affair involving a  police car, a pile of traffic cones and a girl you just met while lying in the gutter. Something that makes you wake up with a dry mouth, a sick feeling and a hungry guilt monster gnawing at your viscera.

BONUS TIP: Make some pledges you'll never be able to keep:
"I'll never go that fast again."
"I'm gonna wear a helmet, every time."
"I think it's time for a high visibility vest."

Tip 69: Take your bike on a train

You'll be popular as a subway rat - and twice as nervous - as you ride the escalator and try not to let your big steel frame run down the masses.
Squeeze into the carriage and manouevre to that one spot where you're not blocking either door, then hold onto the ceiling with your outstretched fingertips.
BONUS TIP: Keep your helmet on until you get to your station. Those dirty glares could turn to violence any moment.

Tip 66: Feel abnormal

You've just emerged from a big meeting and stand by the road shaking hands with important men in very fine suits. They stand on the side of the road looking for taxis. 
Your bike is right there, but you suddenly feel an absence of pride in it, the presence of a sort of weirdness.  Is this shame? 
Do you take the four steps to where your bike is locked and mount it, or wait til they have gone? What will people think?

BONUS TIP: Revel in bike-shame while it lasts. Way things are going, it's something the fixie-buyers of today will never experience.

Tip 64: Take the lane!

And then bore the whole fucking universe to death with your bullshit manifesto.

BONUS TIP: Like whiskey for breakfast or farting in a lift sometimes taking the lane is a tremendous response to a tricky situation. Doesn't make it any sort of basis for a radical ideology though.

Tip 58: High visibilty vest

I'm a dork. I'm a big fat dork.

BONUS TIP: Dorky dork dork dork.

Tip 55: Overtake someone who is trying their heart out

They are on the road in front of you. They are getting closer quickly, but it's obvious they're trying. They are out of the saddle and their bottom is wobbling side to side like a dog wagging its tail.
Before long you're right on their wheel and you have to throw their feelings onto the train tracks and run over them like the locomotive you are. Make an excuse for them - maybe they're at the end of a very long ride?
Eyes straight ahead, you do it.

BONUS TIP: Shut your mouth as you pass to make it look like you're not even breathing hard.

Tip 54: Sample marginalisation

White, educated, politically enfranchised, able-bodied, heterosexual male seeks:
Opportunity to be hated without reason, heckled and assaulted by those more powerful, treated with contempt by law-makers and picked on by law enforcement.

BONUS TIP: Shed your downtrodden status along with your bib shorts each morning when you arrive at the beautifully appointed cycling facilities at your law firm / IT company.

Tip 51: Tangle with the law

You'll be neat and tidy as a pin,
helmet strap snug beneath your chin.
Cruising along the bicycle lane,
reflecting on Miguel Indurain.
When out of traffic shall arrive,
A police car to make you swerve and dive.
they'll clip your wheel, sirens wailing,
while you go flying with limbs flailing.

BONUS TIP: Pick yourself up, red and sore
Don't feel frightened to reproach the law.

Tip 50: Ride after your lights fail

Darkness is a primal fear of any animal who a) does not sit at the top of the food chain like a hungry Californian sits at the business end of a sushi train; b) is not nocturnal, eyeless, a mole or deep-sea creature.
When the double-As in your LEDs fail, you will be forced to confront that fear.
Ride on? Risking bunyip attack, accidental cross-country sections and the insouciant violence of those big, blind, mole-like creatures, the cars?
Or abandon all hope, dismount, and transform into a humble pedestrian?

BONUS TIP: There are those who do not fear the dark, do not shrink or cower, but use it for their own nefarious purposes - bike ninjas!

Tip 49: Go Somewhere!

Sometimes you're riding to keep your quads toned. Sometimes you want to make the air rush across your face-skin.  Sometimes you're burning off a half pack of caramel Tim Tams that you DID NOT EVEN enjoy eating.
Sometimes you're burning through the hilpster ghetto trying to make the girls with tattoos notice you. (Maybe they'll get your name tattooed on them?)  {RDNG TIPS}
But sometimes you're after spatial displacement; sometimes the things and people you need are far from here; sometimes you have to surrender to the geographical economics of your city and just fucking eat up the miles. Revel in it.

 BONUS TIP: Don't lie to yourself about the Tim Tams.

Tip 45: Struggle to get in your pedals

When there is nobody behind you, your pedal is the right way up and you clip in first time.
The number of full loop-the-loops your pedal will do before you get your foot in is directly proportional to the number of intimidating looking people behind you at the light.

BONUS TIP: You laugh at those on platform pedals, and they laugh right back, knowing any efficiency you thought you might gain through these devices is officially lost at every traffic light.