so glad i finally got curl installed and working properly.. do not want to touch or recompile apache again.

thanks for the tip!

<?php

    header("Content-Type: text/xml"); 

    $twitter = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=Foobar"; 
    echo get_some_contents($twitter);

function get_some_contents($site_uri) {
    $curly = curl_init();
    // adjust this timeout to taste 
    $timeout = 5;
    curl_setopt ($curly, CURLOPT_URL, $site_uri);
    curl_setopt ($curly, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
    // time for output
    ob_start();
          curl_exec($curly);
          curl_close($curly);
          $got_contents = ob_get_contents();
    ob_end_clean();

    return $got_contents;
}

?>

Apologies for any weird smart quotes that snuck in there.