jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

Trying out the 3.7.2 release (never used jqgrid before) on firefox w/ firebug.

Copying the "my first grid" demo, I'm loading the style sheet, the locale js, and the the grid js; verified that all are loading via firebug.

Made some changes to the grid logic, trying to reduce my test case -- code at http://nopaste.snit.ch/22949, as pasting HTML into this widget makes it very unhappy, apologies.

This code generates no JS errors, and no XHR request. It seems to do nothing. (not that the XHR to cnn.com I would expect to work, of course, I'm just trying to get it to make any connection at all before I worry about passing it the xml data it needs.)

Any suggestions on how to diagnose this issue?

Thanks in advance.