cleaner way to write this try/except statement?

[John Salerno]

Simon Forman wrote:

> Maybe I did miss something:  Are you actually trying to make a static
> method?  Say, to be able to call it elsewhere than just the Validate()
> method?

I don't know if a static method is the best way to do it, but what I was 
trying to do was make a regular function within the validator class, so 
that I could call it whenever I needed to show that error message. I 
suppose I could just use a regular method to do it, too, but it seems 
more like a utility function than a method that requires 'self'.

My identation seems correct to me (and I get no errors about it), but 
it's still not working the way I have it. Maybe I shouldn't mess with 
decorators right now anyway...