Does this journey tell you anything about the advisability of mixing presentation and code in this fashion?
Mixing presentation and code is exactly what I am trying to avoid.
The 'real' code will have multiple values pulled from the backend DB, not just one value which is why I put them in an anonymous hash. Having said that, for this part of the code at least, the values will be static in the sense that they won't change during the runtime so having Template call a function won't be necessary.
I think perhaps I need to do some more studying of the different kinds of loop that Template offers. Already I have changed quite a bit of what I have written so that one template file includes another instead of having the code process each separately...so much to learn!