OMG OMG OMG.... thankyou for mentioning LWP... I did a little searching on perl.org and it's just what i wanted.... Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou...

ok.. here's what i did.

use LWP::Simple;
$scalar = get "http://www.frequencyyouth.blogspot.com/atom.xml";
@feed = split("\n", $scalar);

again... thankyou... i've been looking for that answer for ages...