That joke comes to you courtesy of my wife's middle school science teacher.

Why does everyone in America now think that just because photographers stick their camera lenses in celebrities' crotches as they're getting out of cars, all of a sudden every celebrity is our best friend, and we know and understand their personalities and the intimate details of their lives?

She probably deserved it anyways.

Bill Murray as the Riddler in the next Batman...I like that idea...I like it a lot.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/articles/A23636-2004Dec 23.html

At the Globes ceremony, where he won best performance (by an actor in a musical or comedy) for "Lost in Translation," Murray got up and told the audience he didn't think he was able to give the standard litany-of-phony-gratitude acceptance speech they'd heard all evening, and then deadpanned: "You can all relax. I fired my agents a couple months ago, [And] my trainer, my physical trainer, killed himself."

And people laughed at that line, nervously, hahahaha, even as it turned out the next morning to be true: Murray had fired his two reps at Creative Artists Agency. His trainer, who'd worked with many celebrities, had killed himself.

"Why would you get up there and bore people?" Murray asks, later, when we finally get to him (and we do eventually get to him in just a little bit, for those of you who are still with us) and ask him about that speech. "I never have figured that out. These people are supposedly in the entertainment industry, and they finally get up there to that podium and they become the most boring people in the world."

This is a little bit like the Murray you read about in gossip columns: Walks off sets. Snarls at colleagues. Gets into some sort of snit with co-star Lucy Liu on the set of the first "Charlie's Angels" movie, and then spends the next four years insisting it was all overblown. There's the Murray who might have had a look of bitter disappointment at the Academy Awards last February when he lost the Best Actor award to Sean Penn. Some say he didn't clap enough (or at all). People point out that he didn't stand, and everyone in Hollywood knows how important it is for losers to graciously stand. (His fans and detractors continue to debate this, online, long after anyone cares.)

And during still more publicity churn this month for the opening of "The Life Aquatic," according to the New York Post's Page Six, a man who identified himself as having worked as a cameraman on the "Charlie's Angels" set raised his hand at a press conference with the cast and director and lambasted Murray: "I am a cameraman, and I've worked with all the actors onstage. Anjelica [Huston], you're wonderful. Willem [Dafoe] -- you're great. But, Bill -- you are a bastard. You are horrible to work with. My question is for Wes and the cast. What's it like to work with someone as awful and difficult as Bill Murray?"

According to the column, Murray said absolutely nothing in response. Both Huston and Anderson tried to respond to the question.

"Bill isn't a bastard," Huston replied.