damn, my solution was to host it locally. how did i blatantly not try this?

Everybody could use protocol relative URLs with the google CDN to simplify things:

  <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.js"></script>

I learn something new every day.

holy shit! Is that universally supported?

Yes, but there's bugs when used with stylesheets in IE7 & IE8

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/02/10/5a-missing-schem...

Many thanks you just saved me from some ugly code I was using to check for http/https; this method is FAR more elegant.

Witchcraft!

(That's awesome)