Imagine receiving a cake in your honor that's shaped like a foot! Cake Wrecks found five of them. One is for a podiatrist, one is a groom's cake, and the others? Who knows! The cake shown here may be a commemoration of some sort of injury, but at least it doesn't have a fungus or a toe-tag! http://www.cakewrecks.com/home/2011/11/16/wrecky-replay-thisll-cure-that-freaky-fetish.html

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A Canada goose ships a gift to a puppy in America by FedEx. This is illustrated with an overly-complicated domino fall using boxes in this extended ad from FedEx Canada. -via the Presurfer

From the eruption in the background and the weapon of choice, you can see that being a park ranger at Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is not like the job your local park ranger holds. These rangers must protect themselves and the park's mountain gorillas from both poachers and warring factions. And now the huge eruption of Nyamulagira volcano has opened up opportunities for the park. They've set up a camp from which tourists can get a good view of the volcano's activities! Read more about it and see a gallery of pictures at National Geographic News. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

(Image credit: Cai Tjeenk Willink, Virunga National Park)

This fetching praying mantis looks like she is flirting with the camera! But the orchid mantis may be a male. An orchid mantis is one of the many flower mantis species that have camouflage to match the type of flower they live among. See a variety of flower mantises at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image credit: Luc Viatour / www.Lucnix.be)

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Besides being cute, Purin the Super Beagle plays catch a bit differently from the way most dogs do it. And she gets better at it as the video goes along! -via Arbroath

The possibilities of Photoshop are only limited by one's imagination. I don't know who originally had the idea to swap facial features in pictures of more than one person, but the results can be freaky! Sometimes the whole face is swapped; sometimes it's hard to tell where each part came from in this selection of images from the Something Awful forums posted at Unreality magazine. Link

The Florida Marlins are now the Miami Marlins. The baseball team got a new logo to go with their new name. They are also getting a new ballpark. But what's that structure over behind the center field wall? It's a home run celebration feature. When the Marlins score a home run, this is going to light up like this:

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It's supposed to have a lot of sound, too. As Grant Brisbee of Baseball Nation says,

We're not here just to make fun of the Marlins.

Except when we have no choice. Which, again, it looks like we don't. There's no way around this one, again.

Link -via Metafilter

Air Force lieutenant Gail Halvorsen flew supplies into Berlin during the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and '49. On one run, he met a group of children near the landing strip.

“They could speak a little English,” he recalled later. “Their clothes were patched and they hadn’t had gum and candy for two or three years. They barely had enough to eat.”

Halvorsen gave them two sticks of gum and promised to drop more candy for them the next day from his C-54. He said he’d rock his wings so that they could distinguish him from the other planes. Then he returned to the base and spent the night tying bundles of candy to handkerchief parachutes.

Not only did Halvorsen deliver he candy, but when word of his caper leaked out, Americans sent lots more candy to be dropped over Berlin. And Halvorsen did just that. Fifty years later, he encountered one of those children on a trip to Berlin, which you'll have to go to Futility Closet to read about. Link -via Fark

You can read more about Halvorsen at Wikipedia. Link

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

You put your right foot in,

You put your right foot out,

You put your right foot in,

And you shake it all about

You do the hokey Pokey And you turn it all around

That's what it's all about!

You put your left foot in, You put your left foot out,

Etc. etc. etc.

For some reason, "The Hokey Pokey" always brings people up; it makes people happier. Why is the Hokey Pokey so popular and beloved? Well, you can come up with your own theory, but no other song seems to symbolize a good time for people and bring a smile to their faces to quite the same extent. In 1942, Irish songwriter and publisher Jimmy Kennedy, best known for "The Teddy Bear's Picnic," created a dance and an instruction song to go with it called "The Hokey Cokey." Written to entertain Canadian troops stationed in London, this song is similar to, but not the same as "The Hokey Pokey" we all know. 

Composer Al Tabor was also entertaining Canadian troops in wartime London, and in 1942, he wrote a participation dance called "The Hokey Pokey." He claimed the name came from the London ice cream vendors of his youth, called "Hokey Pokey Men." The accompanying dance was very similar to Kennedy's. In 1946, totally unaware of the British "Hokey Pokey" and "Hokey Cokey," two Scranton, Pennsylvania musicians, Robert Degan and Joe Brier, recorded "The Hokey Pokey Dance" to entertain summer vacationers at Poconos Mountain resorts. The song was a regional favorite at dances and resorts for the rest of the forties, but that still isn't the song we know today.

As if to confuse matters even more, British bandleader Gerry Hoey also claimed authorship in 1940 of a similar tune "The Hoey Oka." The general belief is that Charles Mack, Taft Baker, and Larry Laprise wrote the American version of the song, "The Hokey Pokey," in 1949 to entertain skiers at the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho. The song was a hit at resorts, so Laprise recorded it. It flopped, but Degan and Brier found out about it and sued Laprise for ripping off their "Hokey Pokey Dance."

Despite the fact that his version came out after theirs, Laprise won the rights to anything to do with "The Hokey Pokey."

Spend some time on the internet and you should became an expert at both detecting and delivering sarcasm. According to research into the subject, that could benefit your brain.

Actually, scientists are finding that the ability to detect sarcasm really is useful. For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance. Children understand and use sarcasm by the time they get to kindergarten. An inability to understand sarcasm may be an early warning sign of brain disease.

Sarcasm detection is an essential skill if one is going to function in a modern society dripping with irony. “Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “People who don’t understand sarcasm are immediately noticed. They’re not getting it. They’re not socially adept.”

Bless their hearts. This article from Smithsonian looks at various studies and what they tell us about how we use, misuse, and abuse sarcasm. Link

Randall Munroe of xkcd  presents a dozen different ways to project the earth onto a map, and analyzes the fans of each. My favorite (after the globe, of course) is the Robinson projection, which pegs my lifestyle pretty well. Link -via the Presurfer

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Deputy Ryan Swartz of Huron County, Michigan responded to a call about a car hitting a deer Friday night. The small doe just stood there dazed, like a deer in the headlights... well, not like, because that's exactly what she was. Swartz got out of his car to shoo the animal off the road before someone hit it again, but the doe still didn't move. So the deputy did what he had to do. After about 25 minutes, the deer took off into the woods. Link -via Arbroath

The Old Thirteenth Cheshire Astley Volunteer Rifleman Corps Inn is a real tavern in Stalybridge, Cheshire, England. But it's not the strangest name for a bar you'll find in this gallery of ten at DJMick. Link -via Breakfast Links

The job pays well, but the minimum education and work experience requirements are pretty stiff and you'll have to relocate to Houston. Also, you must be small enough to fit into a Soyuz spacecraft.

NASA, the world's leader in space and aeronautics is always seeking outstanding scientists, engineers, and other talented professionals to carry forward the great discovery process that its mission demands. Creativity. Ambition. Teamwork. A sense of daring. And a probing mind. That's what it takes to join NASA, one of the best places to work in the Federal Government. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a need for Astronaut Candidates to support the International Space Station (ISS) Program and future deep space exploration activities.

Applications will be taken until January 27th. -via Metafilter

Mike and Nancy Rogers were to be married in the main lodge at White Point Beach Resort in Nova Scotia. However, that building was on fire, so they held the ceremony in another resort building. But the happy couple took the opportunity to pose for a wedding portrait in front of the conflagration. That's one photo composition you don't see at every wedding! Read about the fire and see videos at HuffPo. Link -via Buzzfeed

(Image credit: Nicholas Augustus/Canadian Press)