Comprehensive Unicode -> ASCII python function

unicodetoascii.py

"""Alright, so it's pretty common knowledge that unicode and python just don't get along.  Especially on OS X, apparently?
Separating out the sort function from the actual database that you're working with is, in my opinion, an elegant solution, 
though maybe bad in big-O terms.  Anyway, there are a few good options online, but if you don't want to install any libraries
(here, I need this particular function to be hyper-portable), you have to consider a lot of different circumstances.  

Part of this function (the part that actually does something) comes from here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2700859/how-to-replace-unicode-characters-by-ascii-characters-in-python-perl-script-giv"""

# be sure to import unicodedata

def fkunicode(culprit):
    if isinstance(culprit, unicode):
        culprit = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', culprit).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
    culprit = culprit.lower()
    return culprit