urlopen failing when used on Livejournal

I maintain a Python-based Livejournal client, Charm.

Today, my client authentication attempts consistently fail on timeouts. I picked my code apart, trying to figure out what the heck had gone wrong, since http://www.livejournal.com/interface/flat is perfectly accessible via brower.

However, calling urllib.urlopen() or urllib2.urlopen() on the interface URL fails.
For that matter, doing so on http://www.livejournal.com fails.

Anyone have any explanation for why this should be the case, and how to fix it? It's definitely not my computer -- I've now tested three machines, three different versions of Python, and various other URLs (including the posting interface for Deadjournal), and I'm pretty certain that the issues seem restricted to Livejournal.

wget, by the way, also fails, although not 100% of the time:

--2010-04-06 19:21:33--  http://www.livejournal.com/interface/flat
Resolving www.livejournal.com... 208.93.0.128
Connecting to www.livejournal.com|208.93.0.128|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... No data received.
Retrying.

--2010-04-06 19:22:06--  (try: 2)  http://www.livejournal.com/interface/flat
Connecting to www.livejournal.com|208.93.0.128|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... No data received.
Retrying.

--2010-04-06 19:22:39--  (try: 3)  http://www.livejournal.com/interface/flat
Connecting to www.livejournal.com|208.93.0.128|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 53 [text/plain]
Saving to: `flat'