Node request throwing: Error: Invalid URI "www.urlworksinbrowser.com" or options.uri is a required argument

I'm using Node v0.10.11 on Ubuntu 12.04. I can't figure out what I'm missing to make a streams of urls work with the request module. This program is trying to go to a mailing list site, find the download links for each month, then download the pages for each month.

mikeal's readme says "The first argument can be either a url or an options object. The only required option is uri, all others are optional. uri || url - fully qualified uri or a parsed url object from url.parse()"

If i call url.parse(www.targeturl.com), I get [Error: options.uri is a required argument] If I don't use url.parse, I get [Error: Invalid URI "www.freelists.org/archive/si-list/06-2013"] (this link works perfectly fine in my browsers)

I've cut the code down to 42 lines. Any advice welcome

var request = require('request'),
  url = require('url'),
  stream = require('stream'),
  cheerio = require('cheerio'), // a reduced jQuery style DOM library
  Transform = require('stream').Transform

var DomStripStream = function(target) {
  this.target = target;
  stream.Transform.call(this,{objectMode: true});
}
DomStripStream.prototype = Object.create(
  Transform.prototype, {constructor: {value: DomStripStream}} 
)
DomStripStream.prototype.write = function () {
  this._transform.apply(this, arguments);
};
DomStripStream.prototype.end = function () {
  this._transform.apply(this, arguments);
  this.emit("end");
};

DomStripStream.prototype._transform = function(chunk, encoding, callback) {
  chunk = chunk ? chunk.toString() : "";
  $ = cheerio.load(chunk);
  domLinks = $(this.target);
  $(domLinks).each(function (i, link) {
    currLink = 'www.freelists.org' + $(link).attr('href') 
//  currLink = url.parse(currLink)
    request(currLink, function (error, response, body) {
      console.log(error);
    })
  });
}

var fs = require("fs"),
  output = fs.createWriteStream("out.txt"),
  mainPage = new DomStripStream('td a')

request('http://www.freelists.org/archive/si-list').
pipe(mainPage).
pipe(output);