@rdm: thanks, you nailed it. :-)

@yury: but where would you have gotten the awaitable in the first place? It's easy to see how to get a coroutine -- just define it (with either @coroutine or async def) and call it -- and I think that's the only use case that matters here.

I'm unclear how you could have gotten another awaitable (e.g. an asyncio.Future instance) in another thread -- except by an utterly confused user.