Thanks for the replies, laserray, Humax.

Seems that neither leaving out the "http://" nor using stratum, nor any permutation of those solutions works.

I'm really confused because everything worked fine a couple days ago and the same exact command now seems to be failing.  I'm still able to join other pools too.

I have seen some "slush" victories on blockchain.info, so I don't think we're down.  At least, we haven't been down the whole time I've been suffering this problem.

Could something with my ISP have changed???