I’ve been buying up packs frantically, in order to beat the price rise. Other people stockpile petrol and tinned food: I stockpile stationery.

After all, who sends airletters in 2010? A smattering of collectors, a few pensioners who won’t touch a computer, and defiant retro-stylists like myself. But I have a letter-loving friend in Australia who writes back, on the pretty pictorial aerogrammes the country still issues, and exchanging Facebook Wall posts with her just doesn’t lift my heart in the same way.

(Via @evanrail)

As determined by a Cornell University study (pdf), they are:

1) The Eiffel Tower
2) Trafalgar Square
3) The Tate Modern
4) Big Ben
5) Notre Dame Cathedral
6) The London Eye
7) The Empire State Building

As far as I can tell, students at Cornell’s Department of Computer Science used data from Flickr to determine the images. I gave up all hope of trying to totally comprehend the analysis, though, when I came across this in the study’s text:

But for me, it’s all about the views, especially those entrancing last few minutes before touchdown.

It’s how the details of the world are summoned again, how gracefully scale and shadings resolve into trees and fields and subdivisions. It’s the steady, lyrical motion of a silvery wing over a new place—an entirely unique geography and history that appear simply and perfectly beneath you.

He nails the description of flying into Los Angeles at night: “The city looks like an ad for a computer chip, a kinetic vision of light and energy spilling over the continent’s edge.”

The concept behind Map Envelope: Enter a location and add a message, and the site spits out a page with a Google Maps image in the form of an envelope. Write a note on the inside, fold it up, add a stamp and drop it in the mail. It’s simple. It’s brilliant. And, the first time I saw it earlier this week, I thought: It’s an aerogram for the digital age.

The second thing I thought: I wonder what Evan Rail thinks. Last May, he wrote a moving lament about the slow demise of ready-to-mail aerograms for World Hum. So I sent him a link and asked him what he thought:

I hadn’t heard of this before, but it’s a delightful surprise. This really is almost an aerogram, but customized, sort of like those special holiday aerograms put out by Royal Mail.

It’s mail with a sense of place.

I was surprised to see I could create a map envelope focused on my tiny square in central Prague. With high-quality satellite images, it’s kind of like “you can see my house from here.”

The big thing that traditional aerograms have as an advantage is that they include postage, which means you don’t have to search for a stamp. But if you could combine map envelopes with what the USPS calls PC Postage, which lets you “print the PC Postage indicia directly onto envelopes,” then maybe you’ve solved it. It sounds like a way for aerograms to continue even if the various international postal services no longer print them.

Behold the zonkey. This poor donkey and others like it, painted with stripes to resemble zebras, have been a kitschy mainstay on Tijuana’s Avenida Revolución for years. Before drug-related crime frightened most tourists away—visits from the U.S. have dropped off 80 percent since 2001—many would pay a few bucks to don sombreros and pose for photos with the animals. It’s a ridiculous tradition that somehow endures.

And now, a new Tijuana basketball team playing in a regional Mexican league has embraced the painted zebras, calling themselves the Tijuana Zonkeys. They have striped jerseys and, yes, even cheering “Zonkeys girls.”

The team’s president told the San Diego Union-Tribune: “It’s a crazy, cartoonish figure, and in a way, that’s what the city’s all about. It’s a crazy, cartoonish city where everything is possible.”

He’s right about that.

Go Zonkeys.