Yes, yes, for the love of God, I've seen this:



You can all stop forwarding the link to me now. I mean, yeah, I get it, I've got something of a Mel Gibson fetish--what medievalist doesn't?--but this isn't Got Braveheart.

And the joke here isn't really medieval. It's actually just "Wow, the SNL writers really didn't know much about Gerard Butler." I can see them in the writer's room now. Crap! This Butler guy who's hosting this week, he's Scottish, right? We've got a lot of old Mike Myers material laying around, I suppose we could dust off some of that, but we're going to need to work in a topical reference, something for the kids, you know. Hey, Braveheart, that's a movie about Scottish people, right? And it might be fifteen years old, but it was still in the New Release section at Blockbuster last time I checked, so that counts, right? It's better that then Trainspotting, and that's the only other Scotch movie I can think of.

Oh, and I know that many of my readers are international types that can't be bothered to learn how to use a proxy server, so my Hulu embed above won't work. For you, I offer instead this picture of me nearly eight years ago* at the William Wallace Monument in Stirling:


Looks like they've scrubbed all evidence of the blocky Mel Gibson tribute from the official website. I wonder, is that hastily constructed 1995 movie tie in still at the base of the monument? Anyone know?

--

*Man, I miss that bulky jacket. Fun fact: I got caught in a Welsh hailstorm on that same trip and it completely ruined the leather. And yet I continued to wear it for another three years. The reason? I don't know, probably some sort of tribute to all the brave Scotsmen Irishmen who died caught colds filming Braveheart.