When you hear about a school bus being converted into a recreational vehicle you probably think of a hippie bus with psychedelic paintjobs or something that Otto from the Simpsons would live in.

But sometimes the bus is just the frame and engine used to convey the traveler across the country in style and comfort.

The 1984 Blue Bird school bus purchased by Steven and Lindsay for a mere $2,000 didn't look like much on the outside or the inside, but once they were done renovating it became a boxy palace on wheels.

The couple used reclaimed and recycled materials during the renovation, giving the interior a warm, cabiny feel with lots of wood and a cool corrugated metal comode.

Steven and Lindsay drove the bus from Florida to their home state of Oregon over the summer of 2014, exhaustively documenting not only the renovation but the trip back home for their website The New Oregon Trail.

It's a real trip to see what Lindsay and Steven were able to put together for under ten thousand dollars, and if their current careers don't pan out they could certainly find work as RV renovators.

See more photos of the renovation process here

-Via Country Living

Uncle Rob has a fun arts and crafts project you can do with your kids. It involves using a lawn mower to apply spray paint to a canvas. What could possibly go wrong? Seriously, try to guess how this turns out. 

(YouTube link)

After watching this, I bet you don’t try this at home! “This may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” said a friend of mine.  -Thanks, Tracey!

Peter Thomas says that the project started simply:

One day I thought to myself, "I love to make books and I love to play the ukulele. Can I put these two loves together? Can I make a book out of a uke?"

He and his wife Donna proceeded to make one. Thus began their life's work: to turn book making into an inventive art. Most commonly they build books within the bodies of ukuleles, but they also make miniature books for earrings and books within the bodies of old accordions.

The Thomases also teach classes on book art and exhibit their work. Mostly the wander, traveling across the country constantly in their vargo--that's a gypsy wagon. Fine Books & Collections magazine explains:

The Thomases seem to embrace the old saying about life being a journey, not a destination. The couple spent their early years exhibiting papermaking and bookbinding techniques at California Renaissance Faires. From running a private press, to experimenting with and producing a rich range of museum-quality handcrafted books, to being gypsy artists, it has been a long, and not always straight path for them. “You know the Tarot? I think my card is the Fool, or the Wise Man and the Fool, two steps forwards and one back. Or Mr. Magoo, walking along and walking off a bridge but landing on a moving truck, then being dumped into a river, landing on a barge,” joked Peter Thomas. “When I began I never attempted—or was tempted—to imagine the future. I was too busy doing what I was doing. Learning to make paper. Learning to print better. Gaining my aesthetic voice. Now that I am in the future, I am just trying to make things that are beautiful and bring joy to the beholder,” he added.

-via Messy Nessy Chic (content warning:  nude J.D. Salinger)

Liz Hammett and her mother have the most interesting text conversations. Yes, these texts could be fiction, but they are still gems. Liz has apparently always been a brat, but she’s inherited her sense of humor from her mom. And sometimes Mom gets her revenge.

See a selection of the best conversations at Uproxx, and read them all in Hammett’s Facebook album.

(Video Link)

Yeah, he's one of those dogs. If you live next door, he's going to get on your nerves. Thankfully, he gets all of his barking over quickly. In a mere 4 minutes and 40 seconds, he can bark 376,572,715,308 times. His owner, Jesse Hamel, helps. With a Python script, Hamel multiples each barking iteration 9 times. Soon, your screen and ears fill with barking Gabes.

-via Blame It on the Voices

Randall Munroe came up with an elaborate interactive comic for April Fool’s Day, but due to technical difficulties, couldn’t get it online until Sunday night. Called Garden, it’s a game of sorts, but requires patience. The hover text says, “relax.” You are given what I first thought were UFOs, but they are adjustable grow lights. Set up to three grow lights and leave your garden to grow. According to the site Explain xkcd,

If you leave the lights on and wait (or relax) then the plants in your garden start to grow slowly. The plants appear one at a time slowly, but only a few of them actually grow. There is a large tree that does, but most other plants just appear. Some of the plants sway in the breeze.

Also animals and characters including Megan, Ponytail and Cueball may appear. See examples here 1663: Garden/Images.

Every so often the image will refresh. You can change the number of lights, their position, direction, beam width and the color temperature from red to yellow to white to blue. How much this affects the growth is hard to say, but there seems to be some correlation.  

They have tips there to help you out. As your garden grows, the URL will change. You can copy the URL at any point to share and show people how your garden looks, and they won’t be able to change it. What you see above is my garden from a few minutes ago. Who knows what will happen if I manage to leave that tab open for the rest of the day!     

Relaxing Bath by Lallama

Imperial stormtroopers are just like every other humanoid in the galaxy- they don't like being force choked, they take their armored pants off one leg at a time, and sometimes they just want to unwind in a tub full of warm liquid. However, according to Empire regulations they must wear their helmets at all times, which is why they never have clean hair, so when they sit in a warm bath the lenses on their helmet often fog up, making them easy to catch unaware. This is why the Empire has gone forward with certain anti-bathing regulations, which nearly cost them the war since the Rebels could smell them coming a parsec away, but some troopers are willing to risk TR-8R status for a good soak!

Take some trooper me time with you wherever you go with this Relaxing Bath t-shirt by Lallama, it's the funny way to become a sci-fi star

Visit Lallama's Facebook fan page, official website, Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more delightfully geeky designs:

View more designs by Lallama | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

Well before we could instantly send any old thought we have via text message (and instantly regret what we wrote) those crazy love letter lines had to be written out by hand and mailed.

This process should have given us plenty of time to change our minds about writing anything too crazy, but as Napoleon's love letters to Josephine prove the lovesick have never wasted time with logical thought:

“Your tears rob me of reason, and inflame my blood. Believe me it is not in my power to have a single thought which is not of thee, or a wish I could not reveal to thee.”

But the flames of passion often flicker in the breeze, so when he receives no response Napoleon the nutty in love starts worrying like someone who sends a text but doesn't get an immediate response:

“Without his Josephine, without the assurance of her love, what is left him upon earth? What can he do?”

Things go from bad to worse for Napoleon the jealous lover and Josephine, and in the wake of their break up he starts to send the equivalent of a drunk text as he wallows in misery:

"The veil is torn…It is sad when one and the same heart is torn by such conflicting feelings for one person… I need to be alone. I am tired of grandeur; all my feelings have dried up. I no longer care about my glory. At twenty-nine I have exhausted everything."

Read 10 Lines From Napoleon's Love Letters That Sound Like Crazy Texts at mental_floss

Optina Monastery is an Eastern Orthodox refuge in Kozelsk, Russia. The monks who live there follow the rituals of their spiritual ancestors, including a daily procession of blessings. Father Sergey Kuzmich walks the grounds, giving blessings to the monks. And the cats. The monastery has become home to ten stray cats who found shelter there in return for their pest control services. The cats follow Kuzmich as he does his daily procession.  

(YouTube link)

Kuzmich doesn’t call the cats, but he manages to give them a blessing along the way. The walk just became a habit for them. The monastery found it charming, and made a video to show “something simple and kind.” -via Buzzfeed

When is a marshmallow more than a marshmallow? When it's a work of art, of course. Instagram user Meaghan Mountford (@mallowart) proves that marshmallows are a surprisingly good canvas with her delightful mallow creations.

No word on whether or not the mallows are still edible after they are beautified, but who could eat such charming works of art anyway?

When Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were robbing banks in the 1930s, they became folk heroes because they fought against the Establishment as represented by the evil banks that many felt caused the Great Depression. When the Warren Beatty/Faye Dunaway movie about them came out in 1967, it happened all over again as the duo’s adventures resonated with the counterculture of the time. Almost 50 years later, the movie is still a rollicking action film. Let’s learn some trivia about Bonnie and Clyde.

2. FAYE DUNAWAY'S STAR-MAKING PERFORMANCE ALMOST DIDN'T HAPPEN.

Warren Beatty, doing double duty as star and producer, and director Arthur Penn considered many other actresses first, including Tuesday Weld, Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Sharon Tate, Leslie Caron, and Ann-Margret. (Back when he was only producing it and not starring in it, Beatty had also considered his sister, Shirley MacLaine, for the role.) Beatty said they were turned down "by about 10 women," though he would later say Weld was the only one they made a firm offer to. When Beatty met Dunaway, he didn't think she was right for the part, but he told her to meet with Penn, who he thought would think she was perfect. Beatty was right.

6. THE STUDIO THOUGHT IT WAS GOING TO FLOP AND TREATED IT ACCORDINGLY.

Jack Warner, who measured films according to how well they convinced him not to leave the screening room to use the bathroom, hated Bonnie and Clyde. "That's the longest two hours and 11 minutes I've ever seen!" he reportedly said after seeing an early cut. "That was a three-piss picture!" (Also: "This gangster stuff went out with [James] Cagney!") Thinking they had a turkey on their hands, and despite a warm reception at a film festival in Montreal, Warner Bros. dumped the movie in drive-ins and second-run theaters in August of 1967.

The studio was wrong, and Bonnie and Clyde not only became a hit, but a classic. Read more about the movie in a trivia list at mental_floss.

(Photos: @aqua_rondo)

New seasons of the anime series Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and Detective Conan have begun. To promote them, an artist in Japan created this amazing anamorphic wire sculpture. From this direction, it looks like Phoenix Wright . . .

. . . and from this angle, it looks like Conan Edogawa.

Here's a video showing the shift:

Joseph Medicine Crow-High Bird, the last war chief of the Crow Nation, died Sunday. Nicknamed CrowJoe, he was a writer, historian, and activist. During his life, he received the Bronze Star Medal and the Légion d'honneur for his wartime service and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. The Washington Post has more.

According to Crow tradition, a man must fulfill certain requirements to become chief of the tribe: command a war party successfully, enter an enemy camp at night and steal a horse, wrestle a weapon away from his enemy and touch the first enemy fallen, without killing him.

Joe Medicine Crow was the last person to meet that code, though far from the windswept plains where his ancestors conceived it. During World War II, when he was a scout for the 103rd Infantry in Europe, he strode into battle wearing war paint beneath his uniform and a yellow eagle feather inside his helmet. So armed, he led a mission through German lines to procure ammunition. He helped capture a German village and disarmed — but didn’t kill — an enemy soldier. And, in the minutes before a planned attack, he set off a stampede of 50 horses from a Nazi stable, singing a traditional Crow honor song as he rode away.

After the war, Crow led a distinguished life as an educator, tribal historian, and advocate. He was 102.

-via reddit

(Image credit: U.S. Department of the Interior)

Comedians often have a hard time finding the right audience to try new jokes out on because their friends and family don't make very good sounding boards but they'd rather not go to a club with new material and bomb.

(YouTube Link)

That's why comedians should have a puppet version of themselves made so the puppet can take the heckler's verbal bullets and the comedian can adjust their act accordingly.

Observe this Seinfeld inspired puppet doing observational humor so Jerry can learn what works and what doesn't from the safety of his apartment mansion.

(YouTube Link)

New Material Seinfeld is a web series by director Oren Brimer starring Pete Holmes and Joe DeRosa as a puppet version of Seinfeld named "New Material"...pretty straightforward stuff here...

-Via Laughing Squid

(Image credit: Flickr user Alan Sheffield)

Seven years ago, we celebrated Square Root Day on March 3, 2009, because it is abbreviated as 3-3-09. Even in Europe. At the time, we considered the next Square Root Day to be a long way off, and here it is! Today is 4-4-16, and since 4x4=16, four is the square root of 16. The holiday is the brainchild of Ron Gordon, the master of calendar holidays. On his website dedicated to Square Root Day, Gordon is celebrating the convergence of Square Root Day with Major League Baseball’s Opening Day. You know, the game where men run around all four sides of a square to get home. Tonight is the championship game of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, too! It’s a good day to "root" for your team.

There are plenty of ways to celebrate Square Root Day, including going to a ballgame, planting root vegetables, eating your carrots and other root vegetables cut into squares, watching math videos, etc. Gordon has more ideas, and a contest!

It's a good day to.......get things squared away, try to fit a square peg into a round hole, go square dancing, tie a square knot, travel on Route 66, drink rootbeer from a square glass, root for the underdog, eat a square meal, or watch the pigs root around.

We've established a contest with two prize packets. Each group of winners will share the date in dollars---$441.6. One packet will be divided among 4 + 4 + 16 U.S. winners. A second grouping will share the international prize, also totaling $441.6. The winners will be those who involve the most people in a Square Root celebration. Entries can include creating the largest square root sign from people, serving rootbeer in square glasses to the most folks, or cutting many roots into squares (well, cubes) for a square root stew.

Share your Square Root Day celebrations at the Facebook page dedicated to the day.