Things I'd never heard of til I moved to Loueyville

• Cake wheels: Roulette for cakes. Seriously. There’s a numbered grid and a big wheel with numbers; you put a dime or a nickel in a numbered square and if the wheel stops on your number, you win a cake. Seriously. Sometimes you can choose between a cake, a plate of cookies, or a houseplant. Apparently, it’s a big draw. You almost never see an ad for a church fair or a picnic without it mentioning “CAKE WHEEL!”
• Cornhole: It sounds dirty, I know. It sounds even dirtier when my backyard neighbors at the Catholic center bellow a beer-slurred “CORNHOLIO!!” to resounding applause. Even on Sundays. The chicken-or-egg question remains, what came first, Beavis & Butthead or the game? Cornhole, as far as I can tell, is a social game, best played while drinking, involving a wedge-shaped wooden game board with a hole in the middle. Often the wedges are pimped; popular themes in this neck of the woods are U of L and UK colors and mascots. Players toss beanbags into the hole. I’m guessing that when you get the beanbag (Was it originally played with corn? Get the corn in the hole?) in the hole, you yell “CORNHOLIO!!” Or at least the Catholic guys do. Cornhole is a popular bar game. Imagine my surprise when I first opened the weekly newspaper here to see “Cornhole Night” advertised at several drinking establishments.
• Hot Browns: A local favorite. Basically an open-faced turkey sandwich with tomatoes, bacon, and mornay sauce (a béchamel cheese sauce). Supposedly first created by the Brown Hotel in Louisville.
• Frogger for Charity: Okay, I’m sort of making this one up, but I have never in my life seen a charity (in today’s case a “Nationals Bound” pee wee team of some sort) send children out into the middle of a three lane 45-mile-an-hour-speed-limit road with buckets to collect change. No joke: they’d set up cones along the dotted yellow lines, put the kids in orange crossing-guard vests, and sent them out, one per lane, across Bardstown road right where it meets up with I-264. Not an adult to be seen. This is the second time I’ve seen such noodleheadedness in the past two months! Methinks some of those young ‘uns might not make it to Nationals—with or without your change from the Sonic drive-thru.