And very undesirable. Within minutes you'd have some grand-scale war. Which, in all honesty, does have the virtue of quickly solving the problem.

Actually, just think about the amount of limbs you'd break when you'd rain down. My-my, aren't we just ever so lucky such isn't the standard way of birth.

It would be a fairly Spartan way of survival of the fittest for birds. Live-birth-birds that is. The younglings would just pop-out and whoever learns to fly before hitting the ground is a keeper.

I have had this Twinings-cold-tea stuff, which is supposed to be cold. As opposed to forgotten previously hot tea. It's as if you'd blend normal tea with ice-tea (you know, the stuff made for 113% of sugar).

Thing is politicians and those making the policies aren't all that great at listening. So they stick with making cigs more expensive - though it's known almost the sole effect of that is collecting more tax. Hardly any people quit.

Raising prices of tobacco has had nothing to do with their concern for people's health, but with their insatiable greed.

In Vancouver's downtown east-side, where I live, nobody buys cigarettes in stores (9-11 bucks a pack), but contraband ones on the street: $4.00 a pack :-)

And not only cigarettes, but just everything else: groceries, clothes, electronics stuff, including lap-tops, booze, household items, etc.

It would be quite something to finally land on Venus, and rediscover the spacebirds.

Perhaps it is possible to make very very lightweight eggs, which could fly on some strong upperwinds. As soon as the egg comes out, the chicks would obviously feed on insects. This would make them heavier, so they'll have to learn how to fly. As the weight-increase only goes slowly, they'll have a significant amount of time.

Of course, as they birds will never have to land - they won't need their legs either anymore. Perhaps they'll evolve into a second pair of wings.

For starters, there's no air in space. A spacebird would therefore have to carry its own air, a bit like a diving sperm whale. Since journeys in space tend to be quite long, the spacebird needs really enormous lungs...

Also, spacebirds have to be capable of a) keeping their huge bodies alive and warm in space, where food tends to be sparse and b) cleanly escaping the gravity well of a planet. Both of these demand a <lot> of energy, so spacebirds probably eat radioactive material and have natural plutonium reactors in their stomachs. You thought being hit by pigeon @#$% was bad? Try spacebird guano!

Natural plutonium is now only found in trace quantities here on Earth, which proves that spacebirds once lived here :)

I've never been to a country where the tax on fuel, tobacco & alcohol is higher than it is in the UK, that's not to say there isn't one, maybe that's one of the reasons for our robust black market.