Grant Edwards pointed out in a comp.lang.python posting that the 
documentation for urlopen in the urllib module appears to be self-
contradictory:  at http://docs.python.org/dev/library/urllib.html
in the third-to-last paragraph for the urllib function, it says:

"Alternatively, the optional proxies argument may be used to explicitly 
specify proxies..."

and goes on to give examples.  Then the second-to-last paragraph seems 
to directly contradict this:

"The urlopen() function does not support explicit proxy specification. 
If you need to override environmental proxy settings, use URLopener, or 
a subclass such as FancyURLopener."

I suspect that this second paragraph should just be deleted in its 
entirety.

Thanks, fixed in r61392.