In that project I did manage to get the thing going. What I was trying to say is that at first I did try to search for a negating operator and I was surprised to see none was available. To be honest, I didn't try Karl's solution, that is using something like $(':not([EMAIL PROTECTED])') because I didn't think it would work. I still believe it would be good to have a short operator available for negating (brevity is in the spirit of jQuery as I see it), but the :not solution will do :)
Thank you for the answers, Adrian.