OK, so i did misunderstand the magick of the associate call. fair 'nuf.

what i *did* learn from this, is that the Geography::States module exists, so i don't have to hand-code those.

I always used to let  CGI handle my form stuff, until I got stuck with  HTML::Template at work. before then, i always used the  CGI extensions from  Template::Toolkit.

i genuinely *hadn't* thought about using  CGI's form methods to pass to the template ... now, since my PHB also pokes around in the templates, i wonder how much i'll confuse him if i switch to this way ...