Yes; because the "filehandle argument slot" (for lack of a better name) has to be a simple scalar value or a BLOCK. While it's superfluous in this particular case the block form is useful if you (for instance) have a hash of filehandles and want to use print { $handles->{$somekey} } "Yadda yadda yadda.\n"; directly rather than pulling it out into a tmp variable. The docs for print cover this.

Yep, I picked that up from thedamians Perl Best Practices (a must-read for every Perl programmer IMO). As Fletch rightly points out, it's not necessary in this case, but I just use it wherever I print to a filehandle (easier to do than figure out what's wrong if I ever forget it :-)