Mounted upside-down in a routed hole. Makes you wonder what kind of fubar engineering leads to something like this.
Seems like a clever way to help keep the overall board thickness to a minimum.
My guess was the designer drew the part from a bottom view instead of a top view and it was cheaper to mount it this way than to respin the board 
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The Flexible MIDI Shield: MIDI IN/OUT, stacking headers, your choice of I/O pins
Isn't totally unusual I saw it sometimes one example I can recall is a foil circuit for a calculator.
yea I seem to remember something similar in a older calculator , without knowing what the original device was, I am going to go with CrossRoads theory
I'm leaning toward's CrossRoad's theory, too (barring any additional information); if true, I consider it quite clever, and something to keep in the back of my head/toolbox...
RuggedCircuits:
My guess was the designer drew the part from a bottom view instead of a top view and it was cheaper to mount it this way than to respin the board
But you'd have to respin the board to route the hole. 
The chip is an Elan microcontroller in a TV remote; single-sided PCB. The only reason I can see for flipping it over like this is for top side clearance but there actually is plenty of space -- it's a little blurry in the picture but you might be able to see a few through-hole components (oscillator and electrolytic cap) with their cut off pins sticking up higher than the SOIC would.
Makes you wonder how you'd work this into a production pick-and-place operation. If it was done by machine then there was undoubtedly some poor soul flipping over each part so it could be fed into the machine. An awful lot of hubbub to gain a millimeter of clearance.
Chagrin:
The chip is an Elan microcontroller in a TV remote; single-sided PCB. The only reason I can see for flipping it over like this is for top side clearance but there actually is plenty of space -- it's a little blurry in the picture but you might be able to see a few through-hole components (oscillator and electrolytic cap) with their cut off pins sticking up higher than the SOIC would.
Well, you got a point there, though I still think it was originally designed for clearance reasons (but somewhere down the line, some thru-hole parts and cheap assembly was added?)...
Chagrin:
Makes you wonder how you'd work this into a production pick-and-place operation. If it was done by machine then there was undoubtedly some poor soul flipping over each part so it could be fed into the machine. An awful lot of hubbub to gain a millimeter of clearance.
I have a feeling the whole thing was likely made by a bunch of "poor souls" in a "sweatshop" operation in conditions that we would find horrible (and that they may find the same way, but perhaps better than farming a rice paddy or something else - well, at least until the grind of being treated like robots wears on them, despite the supposedly better "pay"); generally, human "labor" is still cheaper in many cases than machines (which break down and need trained/higher-paid operators and/or maintenance personnel) - especially when there aren't any labor or environmental regulations to worry about.
Hmm... :~