A Pair of Rough Customers Have a Queen Buffaloed

--Art Queen is looking for someone with a strong fence, a big field and nerves of steel to take two buffaloes off his hands. Queen, of Interlachen, Fla., hopes to find a home for John and Dorothy before he heads north to his summer cabin in West Virginia. Buffalo Art, as he now is called, purchased the two young buffaloes after he saw a television report on raising the animals. But Queen quickly had a change of heart. “They are some rough customers, I’ll tell you. When I brought them up here from down south, they were 6 months old and they like to tore up the wagon I was hauling them in. I thought they were going to break out. Then I put them in my barn and they like to tore it down. We could hear them bashing into the tin siding all night long for five weeks,” he said. And they’re hard to fence in. Queen thought about crossbreeding the buffalo with cattle to produce beefalo but decided against it after a veterinarian said the crossbred animal behaves worse than the buffalo. Queen is asking $750 for each of the buffalo. But word gets around. After several weeks of trying, he’s had no buyers.

--Entertainer Willie Nelson, organizing a repeat performance of last year’s FarmAid concert to raise money for farmers, wants to stage the event this year on the Mall in Washington, park officials said. The 14-hour FarmAid concert by more than 50 rock ‘n’ roll and country music acts last September at the University of Illinois in Champaign raised pledges of $9 million. About $900,000 of the proceeds have been distributed. Sandra Alley, a spokeswoman for the National Parks Service, said Nelson has inquired about using the Mall, but no formal application has been made.

--When NASA selects the finalist of its Journalist in Space program, it won’t be author Tom Wolfe. The writer of “The Right Stuff” says he withdrew his application because of pressure to complete his next book, his first novel, to be called “Bonfires of the Vanities.” “The Right Stuff,” which was made into a 1983 film, detailed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Mercury program. Wolfe, at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Conn., to talk about the space program, said he withdrew the application about two weeks ago.