pycurl does not like bad certificates

I keep on hitting this once in a blue moon (maybe after dist-upgrading), pushing to a smart server over https I get the following:

bzr: ERROR: Connection error: curl connection error (server certificate verification failed. CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt CRLfile: none)        
on https://mycompany/bzr/aprojectrepo/mybranch/.bzr/smart

And every time it takes me some time to figure out how to fix it, so I'm noting it here for future reference:
* remove python-pycurl
* or use "http+urllib://"

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/365874

I suppose I should help fix this, but I don't see myself getting round to that any time soon.