“All the cowboys went to that big ranch in the sky,” sighed Slim.
“Died out?” murmured Annie. “I wanted to meet men who brave the wild spaces alone.”
“I don’t mean they died,” corrected Slim.
“Huh?”
“They just call ’em astronauts nowadays!”
________________________________
EagleAye
Momus News 
So…instead of singing, “westward ho the wagons,” they now sing, “skyward ho the rockets.” And instead of Indians, rattlers, blizzards, sandstorms and outlaws, they only have to contend with aliens and those dread words, “Houston, we have a problem.” 🙂
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Haha! Exactly right! I leave it you and your obvious expertise to rewrite the song. 😉 Thanks so much, Lyn. And maybe y’all don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but Happy Thanksgiving to you! 🙂
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LOL never written a song, or rewritten for that matter. We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here in Australia, but we do have a National Day of Thanksgiving on 28th May each year when we say “thank you” to police, ambos, firemen, teachers etc.
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Hey, I like that! We should celebrate that too.
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They must watch out for flying space junk rather than stampedes. Hah! That line “big ranch in the sky” had me laughing before I finished reading. You went where I thought you were going to go and I wasn’t disappointed.
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Yep. With more countries going into space, they might have to worry about robber barons too. 😉 I guess you know the way I think. Glad to know the story delivered what you were hoping for. Thanks so much! 🙂
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Good one! 🙂
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Thanks very much! 🙂
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What do you suppose they are rustling in space? Asteroids that have wandered off the trail?
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Yep. There’s satellites that need repairing. Space junk, like old west dust storms, are a constant concern. I think the astronauts are never allowed to eat beans…in an enclosed place like a space station. Thank goodness for that!
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Wouldn’t want to precipitate re-entry, I suppose.
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Nice! No need for horses there…they are the new and improved cowboys and their bounce will take them anywhere.
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Well, they have a horse. It just looks like a chair and has controller jets to go EVA in. They get to ride around buzzing the ISS Space Station going, “Yeehaw!” 😉 Thanks so much! 🙂
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Astronauts as frontier folk? You betcha! We had cowboys here in NZ about the same time as the US did – same frontier, and some of them were actually the same people, emigrated here via the gold rushes. (Partly for this reason NZ English spelling was American in the 19th century and turned British in the 20th – weird but true!).
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Oh yeah, conquering space will take the same kind of people with that tough-minded independent streak that pacified the American West (and New Zealand and Australia). New Zealand’s name changed? What was it before?
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Sorry, a bit ambiguous – I meant that in NZ, the English we wrote used American spellings and some idioms in the nineteenth century (‘honor’, ‘druggist’, ‘clamor’, etc), but that changed to British ones in the twentieth! But there’s an interesting question here in that nobody actually knows who coined ‘New Zealand’ – it was a Dutch attribution, after Zeeland, and the likely candidate was a map-maker named Johann Blau, but nobody really knows…
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Oh that’s interesting. I wonder why the change. Is that maybe the influence of being a part of the British Commonwealth? It’s interesting to find out about all this stuff I never knew. Very cool.
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It was, basically. In the settler era, NZ was part of the Pacific diaspora – US gold miners, whalers etc were common. Towards the end of the 19th century, as New Zealand became a more established society, the British influence renewed itself and was followed by a specific drive to become ‘more British’ than the British were – for which we were duly ridiculed by everybody else in the British Empire, including the British…
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Clever! Reminded me of the old movie Space Cowboys (I think that’s what it’s called.)
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Oh yeah, I was thinking about that. Great movie. I was considering giving the story the same title. Thanks so much! 🙂
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Fun read – thanks for sharing 🙂
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Good to hear that. Thank you! 🙂
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They wrangle stars now! Love it!
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Yep. They’re roping them doggies up in the sky. 😉 Thanks kindly! 🙂
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