CHU CHUCKLES
Maybe you read the story I wrote last week about Police Chief Jim Chu and his talk to the Board of Trade.
If you didn't, it was about the Stanley Cup riot and whether the chief thought suspects facing charges in connection with the mayhem should be jailed.
Leave it up to the judges, he replied.
But before he began his speech at the Fairmont Waterfront hotel, and did the obligatory scrum with reporters, Chu opened with an anecdote that generated a lot of laughs-at the expense of his heritage.
Let me set it up: Chu attended the FBI National Executive Institute in 2008 somewhere in the United States, where he joined more than 30 other law enforcement leaders from around the world.
Chu got to know the head of a state police agency in the southern U.S. who resembled Colonel Sanders without the goatee. Fellow cops simply referred to him as the colonel. Turns out, the colonel was quite taken by the fact that Chu was from Canada. The colonel wanted to know about Canada, its mountains, its rivers and whether Chu did any hunting or fishing. "I said, 'No colonel, I'm pretty busy being the chief, so I don't do that.'"
Then the colonel asked him if he had ever done any hunting or fishing when he was a kid. "I said, 'No colonel, I grew up in the city, so I played on the sidewalks and on the streets of Vancouver.'"
The colonel had a perplexed look on his face.
"Then he said, 'Well Jim, how about your mom and dad-did they do a lot of hunting and fishing?' I said, 'Well no, colonel. My mom and dad were immigrants from China, so all they did was work all the time.'"
The colonel, even more perplexed, looked at Chu.
"You're Chinese," he said incredulously. "I thought you were an Eskimo."
A rimshot and cymbal crash, please.
GEN XED
In other speech news.
You've probably heard that local boy Douglas Coupland, renowned author, artist and Canada lover, will be the keynote speaker at the first inaugural Cities Summit hosted by Mayor Gregor Robertson.
So what can we expect from Mr. Generation X?
Not sure, but here's a sampling of quotes about meetings, home ownership and dreams from Coupland's novels.
From JPod: "Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity."
From Generation X: "When someone tells you they've just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they're locked into jobs they hate; that they're broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they're fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It's profoundly depressing."
And from The Gum Thief: "Dreams don't come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of the Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer."
Coupland will speak Feb. 1 at the Vancouver Convention Centre.
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