From the Python developers' list: 
Barry A. Warsaw <barry@digicool.com>:
> You really don't want to know what that particular world
> looked like, but let's just say it involved lots and lots
> of angry elephants.

You've been *there*? Dang...that's the timeline that scared me into hanging up my lab coat. It was a slow Saturday and I was hatching Sinister Plan For World Domination number 4.

What happened to the other three? Well...I had been planning to terrorize the western U.S with a giant mechanical spider, until some guys from Hollywood offered me way too much money for it. The trained army of radioactive gorillas I spent the movie money on didn't work out -- my Igor flatly refused to shovel any more radioactive gorilla poop, and you know how hard it is to get good help these days. Blackmailing major cities with a Zeppelin-mounted death ray projector sounded cool but Radio Shack was out of the parts.

OK, so plan #4 was to create voracious mega-amoebas using my Ionic Mutatron and send them out to destroy all my enemies, especially that kid who beat me up in third grade. There I was, cackling insanely, just about to unleash these slimy horrors on an unsuspecting world to wreak havoc and destruction, when the eka-rhodium electrodes on the Mutatron arced over. This produced a wild spike of temporokinetic energy, and guess where *I* was standing? Silly me.

Before you could say "plot complication" I was materializing in the Hyraxeum — damn near nose-to-trunk with the High Pachyderm himself, as it turned out, who was getting wound up to try out his newest human-goad on a mahout they had just captured from the Fortified Cities. The mahout was terrified out of his wits, and you would have been too if you'd seen what the High Pachyderm's tusks were covered with and the lascivious way his trunk was curled around that cheese grater. Euggghhh...

It was crazy. The High Pachyderm was trumpeting like mad, tuskers charging at me from all directions, and me with at least 5.23 seconds to go until the temporokinetic charge wore off. Fortunately I remembered that elephants communicate using modulated infrasonics that they hear with the flat part of their foreheads, and I had my trusty sonic screwdriver on me. I set it to "infra" at maximum volume and hurled it at the High Pachyderm — hit the bugger right in the tiara. He went berserk and his confused guards started crashing into each other left and right, which was a pretty impressive sight since the smallest of them weighed over two and a half tons. It was touch and go there, let me tell you. I caught one glimpse of the mahout's rapidly-retreating heels just as the charge wore off and I was slingshotted back to my lab. My sonic screwdriver, of course, followed within seconds — horribly crushed and mangled.

And that's when I swore off building fiendish devices. Electrocution I can laugh at, having my monstrous creations turn on me is all in a day's work, and that one time I was accidentally transformed into a fly I found some truly remarkable uses for a three-foot-long prehensile tongue. But what the High Pachyderm had planned was too twisted even for *me*.

I decided Sinister Plan #5 would have to be a bit less hardware-intensive, if only as a rest for my frazzled nerves. So I spent the last juice in the batteries on the orbital mind-control lasers (long story) to implant some subtle suggestions in a few minds at Netscape and IBM and elsewhere, and started hitting the conference circuit pretty heavy.

What suggestions? Oh, nothing important. Nothing at all...BWAHAHAHAHA!!!