BLOBS, CGI, utf8 vs latin1 and perl Storable

[karres]

Hi,

I need to store some arbitrary data generated as part of a CGI script into my db. I have a table for this

CREATE TABLE _Session_Data (
id bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
SID bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL,
date_added datetime NOT NULL,
`key` varchar(1024) character set latin1 NOT NULL,
`value` blob NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

The data is in a rather grody hash-of-various in the CGI so I decided to use the perl "Storable" module to squish the hash into a scalar and store that with a key in the table above. The INSERT to poke this stuff in the table is working. The SELECT to get it out is producing this error though.

#1267 - Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and
(utf8_unicode_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation 'like'

I'm not seeing how to coerce the operation. help?