Today is St-Jean Baptiste Day, la fête nationale in Quebec.  And yes, it usually takes place one week before Canada Day.  While many federalist francophones will take both today and next Monday off, let’s just say that there are a lot more establishments that remain open July 1st in la belle province than within the rest of them.  Just don’t go out celebrating tonight if you’re an anglophone, lest they sic the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society on ya.  See, St-Jean Baptiste is above all a francophone holiday, albeit not one celebrating the kind of French you learned in school or the sort that they speak on the streets of Paris.  It’s really the Jour J for joual, the garbled Québécois dialect that, as one popular French-Canadian singer put it, is like “a diamond made of plywood, carved with a fishing knife.”

That singer is Mononc’ Serge, sort of a Québécois cross between Dennis Leary and John Tard (of 3Tards fame).  His new video for “Le joual,” taken from his latest album, Ça c’est d’la femme (Translation: “Now that’s a woman!”), features an obese Quebecker beating on a skinny Frenchman in the squared circle, then celebrating with a post-match victory poutine, natch.  It also contains the catchy, sing-a-long chorus “Fuck ceux-là qui disent qu’on parle mal!”  (I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what that means, heh heh.)  Crack open a Molson Dry and take a gander at it: