Does this make sense as a question, or does anyone understand what's going on?

Not really, and you're confused :)

I'd switch to the latest WWW::Mechanize, it seems to be more friendly

See https://metacpan.org/module/LWP::Simple#head

$ lwp-request -m head http://example.com
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:17:18 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Last-Modified: Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:13:15 GMT
Client-Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:24:41 GMT
Client-Peer: 192.0.32.8:80
Client-Response-Num: 1


$ perl -MLWP::Simple -le " print for head( shift ) "  http://example.c
+om
text/html; charset=UTF-8

1297271595

Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
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