Buzz Blog

Welcome, welcome, Trader Joe's!
We can't believe our luck.
But the store won't be the same without ...

... Two Buck Chuck.

(The poet thanks New York State law, which prohibits wine sales in supermarkets.)

Buzz likes to shop Main Place Mall. We get a kick out of their quaint signage, as well as the dollar store with the narrow aisles and forced togetherness.

Today we got to wondering what was upstairs, besides the historic food court. So we went up to find out.

We found the most marvelous thing.

A gym!

It is free. It is a big looping track that just runs the expanse of the mall. People were walking it, many of them wearing sneakers with their office clothes. It is not like regular mall walking because there are no shoppers to get around.

And the greatest thing is, the sound system plays classical music! Today they were playing the finale of Schubert's B Flat Piano Trio.

 

This sure beats the crud we have to listen to at the gym we normally go to! It also beats that boneheaded advice we got not too long ago about how to exercise at the mall.

We will have to work out at Main Place Mall more often!

Here are Buff State students dancing and doing back flips for Bucks4Books. Bucks4Books must be having a contest because these videos are all over the Internet.

It is too funny how the gals in the Buff State video throw themselves over backwards one by one! Then you have that last girl left just shaking her rear. Haha! Well, it is for an intellectual cause.

Here are their rivals at UB.

Buzz can't help noticing that melody is a lost art. How about Bucks4Music Lessons?

One final video because Buzz just loves the name "The Buffalo 716ers."

Hahahaa! Love that old cartoon music. Such talent in our schools!

It makes us want to sell our textbooks at Bucks4Books.

We must have some kicking around somewhere!

... is people trying to tell us how not to gain weight during it.

Buzz is on a million diet and exercise mailing lists and the other day we got a list of pointers on how to work in exercise when you are in a mall. It came from Calorie Count, this app we have and, being a proud Buffalonian, never use.

But still, out of pure curiosity, we opened the list and had a peek. Park farther away from the door, OK, yeah, got that. Use the stairs, not the escalator, OK, we already do that.

However. ...

These Calorie Count folks said that whenever you pass a bench, get down and do push-ups on it.

Hahahahahahaaa!! It is not Buzz laughing. It is all your fellow Galleria shoppers, shown above in a recent News file photo, who are standing around eating cinnamon buns and watching you do your pushups.

Other suggestions, so weird you could not make them up: Use fitting rooms for doing squats and jumping jacks. And ... and ... we can hardly type this because it is just so funny ... Bring along hand weights to carry in your bags as you shop.

We just read this one out loud and a co-worker is going, "Oh ... ow.... owww..." Now Buzz is laughing too so hard our stomach hurts.

Hey ... now we get the point of this list!

Laughing this hard sure gives your abs a workout!

Buzz will be wearing a gold, sparkly dress we bought at the Rainbow Shop, where we were taking pictures yesterday of unmentionables, remember?

The dress was $10! Seeing us hesitating, wondering if it was too short, a girlfriend teased us.

"It's 10 bucks!" she laughed.

You spend more than $10 on a routine visit to Mighty Taco!

So we bought the dress and we took it home and that was when we really fell in love with it. Because when we looked at the label we saw it was made of a fabric with the most marvelous name.

It is Lurex!

Not to be confused with the Lorax, pictured above.

We love that name Lurex. It sounds lurid and alluring and people use it to lure people. We can't wait to wear it to the ball drop.

We will be the talk of Roosevelt Square!

You know how they used to call lingerie unmentionables?

Those days are back!

At least at Rainbow Shops. Buzz loves Rainbow Shops. Very often there is a pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow, we have found. You get scarves, gloves, jingly jewelry. We bought a gown there and wore it to a party last summer.

The, uh, unmentionables, though.

Santa must be blushing!

The life-affirming color, reminiscent of Kmart!

(Notice the old Woolworth's floor and infrastructure.)

We saved the best for last.

A camo-sole!

Rainbow, got to love it.

It lives up to its name!!

How do shoppers top the excitement of Black Friday? With the History Museum's annual book signing! Local authors turn out to sell and sign their books. It is turning into a big shopping event.

Above, celebrity vocal coach Andy Anselmo, who taught Liza Minnelli, Mandy Patinkin, Tony Bennett and so many other stars. He is promoting his entertaining memoir, "A Star-Crossed Life." That is his nephew with him.

Mike Rizzo was there with his latest book, about the Mafia in Buffalo. It was arguably the hottest sell in the room. People want to read about the mob! They cannot get enough of it.

Rizzo is a common name in Buffalo and so Mike Rizzo was constantly being asked if he was related to other Rizzos. Hahahaa!

Here we give you Buffalo News food critic emerita Janice Okun, right -- with her book, "Buffalo Cooks With Janice Okun" -- and celebrity historian Cynthia Van Ness, author of "Victorian Buffalo."

Front and center were Steve Cichon of WBEN-AM, left, and Ed Kilgore of Channel 2, with his book "As I've Seen It: Wide Right, No Goal and Other Buffalo Sports Sagas." When you walked in they were the first people you saw, framed in the doorway.

But where was Kilgore's turtleneck? The Buzz column has praised Ed Kilgore's fashion sense for years, in particular his taste in turtlenecks. Steve had on his trademark bow-tie. Where was Kilgore's trademark turtleneck?

Kilgore laughed at us as, God love him, he always does.

"If I'd known you were coming," he said, "I'd have worn a turtleneck."

Next year we'll make sure he does!

You know the Canada goose.

Now meet the Canada turkey!

A buddy went to the Niagara Falls Walmart the other day to choose a cheap turkey. She could not help noticing that gathered around the display of bargain turkeys were customers with carts piled high with them. We are talking dozens of big, slippery turkeys! Unlike Tops and Wegmans, Walmart placed no limit on turkey purchases.

Our friend, who is holding a small gathering, searched high and low until she found just the right turkey to suit her needs. She set it aside and, as she did so, spoke up, Buffalo style, to the other shoppers.

"This is my turkey," she laughed. "I'm just going to run and get a cart."

When she got back two minutes later, her turkey was gone. It was in a cart with a dozen other turkeys! The owner of the cart was standing over it, hostile. He would not give it back.

It is a turkey-eat-turkey world out there!

Our friend says she learned that the turkey-gobbling shoppers were from Canada and they were buying the bargain birds to resell them up there.

It must be some law of nature.

The geese fly south.

The turkeys fly north!

 

Love, love this sign at Main Place Mall.

Let us now revisit that timeless classic, "Pants On the Ground."