Praise be to Aaron who suggested I try 1 or 0 rather than true or false in my request and it works! (The Blogger docs say "true" but it's obviously false since that behavior was spotty and unpredictable.) Now we're cooking!! I wrote up how I did it in case you want to do it too.
Alas, the API is still not "publishing," it's only "posting." Many people have tried it out but it's only appearing along the right because I went into Blogger and manually published as I was setting up the archives. Yes, now there are archives to all this so you can catch up if you miss anything. Drat! I really wanted this to work. Now I feel all pouty!
It seems other folks have had similar experiences with their TiVos like I mentioned on Monday. I posted my suggestion to the TiVo forum; if you have a TiVo and would like to see a similar feature implemented, go voice your support.