"As usual, I'm backwards," Thornton tells Mr. Showbiz in a recent interview. "As everybody else has gotten worried, I'm not afraid of flying now ... Now I feel a little safer because people feel weird about it."

Thornton's hanging onto a few of his other fears, though. "The fear of Benjamin Disraeli's hair, the antique phobia ... the fear of clowns," he says. "Mimes are really creepy, but clowns are frightening!"

Actually, Billy Bob would like to clarify something about that antique phobia thing -- it has nothing to do with fear itself.

"I'm not scared of them. I can't breathe around them and I get real weird about them," he tells the Los Angeles Times. "I went into this restaurant one time and just froze. Couldn't even have a bite. Couldn't even drink my water."

But the actor insists that he and Angelina Jolie, the woman whose blood he wears around his neck, are just normal folk all the same. "Sorry," he tells the Toronto Sun, "I have no dungeon, I don't drink blood and I eat more than orange food. I'm such a disappointment!"

Well, maybe not a complete disappointment? That rumor that he likes to wear Angelina's undies?

"That's something that I did one time and they made it into a big thing," he says, adding that he "wore it on one leg."

These days, however, Thornton says, he's "not into wearing any underwear."

Nice to know that fear of keeping his mouth shut's still intact.

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Speaking of Angie ...

How many sentences does Angelina Jolie wait before she mentions hubby Billy Bob in the journal of her recent trip to Africa she posted "unedited" on the Web site of the United States Association for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees? Three.

"I know my husband will read this, but I will try not to think about that as I write," she writes in Sentence 4 of Day 1. "I love him so much. I never want him to misunderstand me, and yet I know I need to write uncensored. I am not writing for the person who may read these pages but for the people I will be writing about."

None of whom, one assumes, have ever had the opportunity to wear her underwear.

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You listening, Angie and Billy Bob?

"Actors should be seen and not heard. Once the public knows what you have for breakfast and who you're sleeping with, there's nothing left to tell them."

-- John Corbett (who played DJ Chris Stevens on "Northern Exposure" and is set to appear in "Sex and the City" and the flick "Serendipity") offering the sagest words we've heard in weeks, in the Calgary Sun.

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Juicy bits

Those of you still holding your breath for Alec Baldwin to make good on those alleged threats to leave the country in the event of a Bush presidency might want to exhale now. These days, he doesn't even want to leave New York. "I feel like now is one of the greatest times to be in New York, because we're going to see all these great ideas flowing about how we're going to change the way we live here," Baldwin tells the New York Daily News. "And then there's that weird part of me that thinks if New York got bombed again, I want to be here. I'd rather die getting bombed in a New York bombing than live some kind of shallow life somewhere else." Spoken like a true New Yawker.

Macy Gray's confessed that the whole reason she agreed to make her acting debut in "Training Day" was because she wanted to get close to Denzel Washington, who stars in the flick. But Denzel was hardly her first celebrity crush. That distinction, Gray tells Blender magazine, belongs to Michael Jackson. But, she rushes to clarify, that was "before he fucked his face up."

It was only a matter of time: "Starsky & Hutch," the movie. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the '70s cop show is racing toward the big screen. Ben Stiller has reportedly agreed to step into Paul Michael Glaser's undercover shoes as Dave Starsky (the brown-headed one). The role of the blond guy, Ken Hutchinson, originally played by David Soul, is apparently still up for grabs, as is the role of the ever lovable street informant, Huggy Bear. Stay by your phone, Chris Rock ...

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