Thanks for the ideas, everyone.functools.partial and lambda expressions seem like a more pythonic way of doing what I want. I don't know whether they're actually more efficient or better, but at least they eliminate the need to carry args around separately.
I'd forgotten Python has a sched module in its standard library. It may be overkill for what I want to do but I'll take a look.
-Tom -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list