<movie_critic_mode>   Insightful!   Beautiful!   "I grinned broadly"   </movie_critic_mode>

No, really, now that you point it out, it may _be_ a flattened hash AM's playing with.   And you point out a solution using hash slices because:

• using keys %record would be wrong as you can't guarantee the order that the keys will be returned.
• there may be other hash keys that he doesn't want to use