First off, I think this is a neat idea. When I first saw the code, I was just going to make the "<BR>"x20 suggestion; then I thought I'd do some indenting, too. Then I thought about only reading from the file once; and so on. Anyways, shown below is how I'd go about writing this; the demo is here.

Update: Dog and Pony should never have mentioned it fading over time; I've wasted yet more time on this now. Whee! Anyways, demo is here. It also uses an exponential scale for the colors now; hitting the page causes anything that's there to "decay," as does letting time pass. Entering the same meme again makes it "fresh" again.

Update: Code has been moved from here to here.

perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^`+*^e v^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'