I've made considerable changes to Michael's code, specifically to use
the select() system call directly and to store the timeout as a C
double instead of a Python object; internally, -1.0 (or anything
negative) represents the None from the API.

I'm not 100% sure that all corner cases are covered correctly, so
please keep an eye on this.  Next I'm going to try it Windows before
Tim complains.

No way is this a bugfix candidate. :-)