Right, it's kind of weird and definitely different than static class variables in Java (see [this SO post](http://stackoverflow.com/a/68672) for more info).

Basically, class variables are "static", but you can shadow them like @wasade is doing in his example by setting an instance attribute with the same name.

In this case, I recommend making this (only) an instance attribute since there could be multiple instances of the HTTP handler, and we want ```_unrouted``` to be unique to each instance. To do that, define the attribute in the constructor like so:

```
self._unrouted = True
```