Tip 107: Pedal squares

Regular quadrilaterals got a bad name until concerned hipsters mounted a thankless campaign to rehabilitate their image: sporting square-frame spectacles; rocking checked shirts; and promoting suffocating conformity.
Newly endorsed by the cool set, your defective pedalling technique will no longer be a source of derisive glances, but of seething envy.

BONUS TIP: When everyone's buying up John Lennon glasses and tie dye, you will know it is time to research  how to "introduce power tangentially to your pedal action." Until then, just have the phrase on hand so you are ready to appear avant-garde.

Tip 103: Creative ways to entertain with Salmon!

With summer coming on, it's time to think about entertaining.  To make sure what you serve up is what everyone is talking about, take the time to do a little more with your Salmon this summer.  Here are a few tips:

Smoked Salmon: Ride a bike the wrong way up a street while under the influence of the weed.

Tinned Salmon: Ride a bike the wrong way up a street while wearing a suit of armour.

Salmon Roe: Ride the wrong way up Saville Row.   

Blini: Ride the wrong way up a street while covered in sour cream and riding a small flat bike made of buckwheat.  (Buckwheat recumbents are the latest in bamboo bike technology: likely to be hot this summer, but stale shortly thereafter).

BONUS TIP:

Salmon Mousse: if you really want to make an event to remember, trap a bull moose, tame and saddle it before riding it up a one way street in Alaska.

Tip 100: Get in the inside lane

Much like smoking cured banana peels, you have no idea if this is legal, but sometimes you have to do it anyway.
When traffic in the outside lane is an MC Escher clusterfuck of blundering taxis, death-crazed pedestrians and a learner driver ruining a reverse park, you crave the clean free asphalt of the inside lane.
You headcheck and go.  It's so nice! It's so familiar! But sneakily its dangerous and different.  You're out of your element. Traffic is passing you on the wrong side. Yipes. Like Marty McFly in the Back to the Future trilogy,  you've got to get back home, and you just need the right amount of speed to get you there.

BONUS TIP: The mad professor that will arrive in the nick of time save you from being crushed by a head-check-hating, SUV-piloting mother-of-two is in this case not Doc Emmett played by Christopher Lloyd.
It is you, and the conveniently timed burst of lightning that will power you home is gonna have to come out of those legs.

Tip 67: Fall off for no apparent reason.

One fine day, absolutely nothing will be enough to topple you off that still-uncomfortable perch on the Brooks you paid so much for.  As your carbon triangles skitter away across the black-top like a shuffle on a shuffleboard, you'll be lying on your back seeking perpetrators.  Was it the gentle zephyr, the most peripheral pedestrian, or a half-stoned koala in a near-by gum tree?

BONUS TIP: Don't bother people with this non-story. Falling off your bike is not a magic trick and the lack of explanation will not intrigue.  If you don't concoct a big fat lie full of cause and effect, the narrative vacuum will fill up fast with derision.

Tip 60: Tear your trousers in your chain

Here's how it goes - you're wearing Daffy Duck socks, so you forego the rolling up of suit pant that normally exposes such a beautifully defined calf. Instead you throw caution to the wind. An unpropitious gust immediately blows that fine fabric back between the teeth of the cog and the grip of the chain. Putain de merde!

BONUS TIP: The size of the tear that results is a fair power meter. If the rent proceeds to the thigh, you may well be Cadel Evans. Thanks for reading, Cadel.

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 34: Ride with flat tires

Top track athletes train with tractor tires tied around their waists. Top archers shoot with their eyes closed. Top swimmers do laps with a brick in their speedos. You ride with flat tires.

BONUS TIP:  Refuse offers of pumps. Smile when they say you're crazy - it will make veins stand out in their foreheads.

Tip 5: Hang onto a tram

Public transport is taxpayer funded.  Even if you've cleverly engineered your financial circumstances to minimise income tax - by, say, becoming a video installation artist - you still pay tax. All those daily transactions involve a greasy government middle-man taking his GST.
Every pair of Vans includes $10 that goes straight to the government. Every soy latte is another 35 cents jangling in the taxman's pockets.
Don't imagine you've lost those precious pennies just because you are a cyclist.  Public transport is there for you.  Hang on tight as the number 96 ascends Bourke St. You deserve it.
The newer trams are more of a struggle for hand holds as The Man tries to shut the humble cyclist out, but anyone with rock climbing experience will be able to stick a digit in a crack, stop pedalling and benefit from propulsion they already paid for.

BONUS TIP: Wanna prove you've got the juice in your caboose? Take your mountain bike onto the train tracks and hang onto the 9.15 running express to Richmond.