I am absolutely baffled by MeowChow solutions. What the heck does +pop do?

Sorry {g} I should have put my golf clubs away :) The +pop simply removes the first argument from @_, which is the hash reference, and the %{...} around it dereference the hash ref. The + is there because the dereference by the enclosing %{...} is otherwise ambiguous. Without it, Perl would assume you are just referencing a hash variable named %pop, since the characters between the braces would all be [a-zA-Z0-9_ ]. Hmm... I hope that made some semblence of sense.

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print