Flaps down, captain.
Maybe I'll just learn twisted or just give up and be more linear in the way I'm thinking, but that won't probably teach me what's actually happening "under the hood" when somebody needs to write something like node-watcher, twisted or, in my case, buffer watcher. I guess writing thread-safe event-based programming is hard, huh? ...given that the most clear "here's how you do it" I can find is http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/365292 and that ain't short. Then again, neither is this email. ...