A book signing for drinkers

THE PALMS isn’t exactly what you’d call a literary haven, so it was a bit curious when the casino’s concert venue held its first book signing last weekend -- with Chelsea Handler.

After seeing her sold-out show Saturday, hundreds of fans lined up for an autographed copy of Handler’s “Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea.” Her comedy proved perfect for the Palms demographic, because her audience has a large percentage of attractive women, and, as she said the next day, “my fans in general are pretty big drinkers.”

Of course, Vegas turned that up a notch: “Everyone here is a little bit drunker. People in Vegas have been drinking all day.”

Despite her jokes about imbibing, Handler proved a hard worker, spending close to two hours signing about 400 books and T-shirts. She also had a perfect Vegas moment at the Palms when a waitress approached her boyfriend to make a pass at the couple: “I think she had heard that I propositioned someone last time I was here. But she probably had me confused with Denise Richards.”

Wynn’s thoughts on the economy

When the economy hits the skids, you want a smart and rich guy to explain it all to you. In Las Vegas that man is Steve Wynn. And, it turns out, unsurprisingly, that Wynn has spent a great deal of time thinking about our economic woes.

Wynn opposed the bailout and explained his view of how we reached this point: “We got there because good business self-interest and good business sense got out of line and incorrectly focused. . . . I hate to disagree with politicians, but it wasn’t greedy, nasty, dishonest people who did this. This was anybody who borrowed from a bank for a price they could not afford. They were not greedy or dishonest. They were acting in a very instinctive and human way.”

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