[martijnvds]

The Vatican?

[ant6n]

The latin in latin-1 refers to the alphabet, not the language. In fact latin-1 can encode many Western European languages.

[CoastalCoder]

I believe it was a joke.

But the humour may have been lost in translation. It's funnier in the original ASCII.

[mmastrac]

The high bit is generally used to indicate humour.