2026-05-21 — rigmarole
Morning, friend. Thursday, May 21st. Thursday is the day the week's plan and the week's reality finally sit down to compare notes, and neither one comes out of the meeting looking good.
(Rigmarole is a long word worn down from a longer phrase: "ragman roll." A ragman roll was a roll of parchment hung with names, and the most famous of them is the Ragman Roll of 1296 — the instrument by which most of the Scottish nobility and clergy swore homage to Edward I of England after his invasion, hundreds of separate deeds of fealty stitched into one roll, each with the swearer's wax seal dangling off the foot of it on a ribbon. Reading the thing start to finish was a long, dragging, seal-clattering recital of names. By 1736 the spoken phrase "ragman roll" had worn down to rigmarole and meant what the experience had felt like: a long, confused, faintly absurd procedure you have to follow to the end whether or not anyone still remembers the point of it.)
Joke
Every required field on a form commemorates one specific incident nobody remembers.
Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)
In 1440, Pope Eugene IV — most of the way through a difficult pontificate, hosting an ecumenical council in Florence and short of money the entire time — pawned the small Tuscan town of Sansepolcro to the Republic of Florence for 25,000 florins. It was an ordinary transaction for the century: a cash-strapped sovereign putting up territory as collateral. A joint commission was sent into the upper Tiber valley to walk the new border and mark where Papal land ended and Florentine land began.
The two halves of the commission were given the same instruction. The boundary would follow a stream called the Rio. They went into the valley, found a stream called the Rio, and marked the border along it. The difficulty was that there were two small watercourses in those few kilometres of hillside that the locals called the Rio. The Papal surveyors marked their border along one. The Florentine surveyors marked theirs along the other. Nobody compared the two maps.
Between the lines lay a wedge of land about two kilometres long and never very wide, with a single hamlet on it — Cospaia, a few hundred people, some vineyards, a church. Florence's map showed Cospaia as Papal. The Papacy's map showed Cospaia as Florentine. Both were filed. Neither was checked against the other. And the residents of Cospaia, who could read a map, worked out fairly quickly that they had been left over.
They did not petition to join either neighbour. They declared themselves a republic.
The Republic of Cospaia had no written constitution, no head of state, no army, no police force, no judiciary, no prison, and no taxes. It was administered — to the degree it was administered at all — by an informal council of the older heads of household, which met when something forced it to in the church of the Santissima Annunziata. Carved into that church, in the only sentence the republic ever produced that resembled a founding document, were four Latin words: PERPETUA ET FIRMA LIBERTAS. Perpetual and firm liberty.
What turned the liberty from a curiosity into an economy was tobacco. The plant reached Italy in the later 1500s, and within a few decades both the Papal States and Tuscany had done what early-modern states did with a profitable new crop: licensed it, taxed it, and eventually ran it as a state monopoly. Cospaia belonged to no state. It owed no licence fee and paid no duty on tobacco to anyone, because there was no one to pay. So Cospaia grew tobacco — openly, in quantity, and well — and sold it across two borders into territories where the identical leaf was monopoly-controlled and dear. For most of two centuries the republic was, in effect, a duty-free aisle two kilometres long. Its tobacco had a name in the regional trade. So did its general willingness to let almost anything cross it untaxed.
The accident lasted 386 years. It outlived Eugene IV by three and a half centuries, outlived the Republic of Florence, outlived the Medici grand dukes who replaced it, and was still there — ungoverned, tax-free, growing tobacco — when Napoleon came and went. What finally ended it was not conquest but tidying-up: in 1826 the Papal States and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany jointly agreed to absorb the strip and split it between them. The terms recorded locally were gentle — each family is said to have received a single silver papal coin, and the area kept a capped licence to go on growing a set number of tobacco plants, a grandfather clause for the one industry the whole place had been built on. Cospaia is now a quiet hamlet of the comune of San Giustino, in the province of Perugia. The church still stands, and the four words are still carved into it. They were accurate for three hundred and eighty-six years.
A dev fact for the back pocket
Press Tab in a terminal, then press Ctrl-I in the same terminal, and the program on the other end receives the identical byte: 0x09. It cannot tell them apart. Not "doesn't bother to" — cannot. They are the same character. So are Enter and Ctrl-M (0x0D). So are Escape and Ctrl-[ (0x1B). This is not a bug and not a coincidence. It is the single most deliberate decision in the ASCII table, and it is sitting under your hands right now.
ASCII was standardised by the X3.4 committee of the American Standards Association — first as ASA X3.4-1963, then the revision everyone actually inherited, X3.4-1967. It is a 7-bit code: 128 positions, 0x00 to 0x7F. The first 32, 0x00–0x1F, are the control characters — NUL, BEL, BS, HT, LF, CR, ESC, and the rest. The committee did not scatter them. They placed each control character exactly 0x40 below a printable character, so the relationship between the two could be computed with a single bitwise operation.
That operation is the Control key. Holding Ctrl and pressing a key ANDs that key's ASCII value with 0x1F — it clears the top two bits of the seven. Run the arithmetic:
Iis0x49.0x49 & 0x1F=0x09= HT, horizontal tab.Mis0x4D.0x4D & 0x1F=0x0D= CR, carriage return.[is0x5B.0x5B & 0x1F=0x1B= ESC, escape.Cis0x43.0x43 & 0x1F=0x03= ETX, end of text.Gis0x47.0x47 & 0x1F=0x07= BEL — the byte that, sent to a 1967 Teletype, fired a literal bell.@is0x40.0x40 & 0x1F=0x00= NUL, the null byte. Ctrl-@ is how you type one.
On a Teletype Model 33 — the terminal the standard was written alongside — the Ctrl key did this in hardware. There was no software layer. The key physically held two bits low while the rest of the keyboard's contacts closed. "Control character" is not a metaphor. It is the character you get when you control which bits are allowed to leave.
The one control code that breaks the pattern is DEL — 0x7F, the very last position in the table, every bit set. It sits alone down there because of paper tape. A teletype punched characters into a paper ribbon as patterns of holes, one column per character; a hole is a 1, and you can punch a hole but you cannot un-punch one. So how do you delete a character you have already committed to the tape? You back the tape up one column and punch out every remaining hole, turning whatever was there into 1111111 — all bits set, 0x7F — and readers were specified to ignore 0x7F entirely. DEL is 0x7F because 0x7F is the one value reachable from any other value on a medium whose only available edit is "add another hole." The Delete key on the keyboard in front of you is named after an operation on a spool of tape that the standard's authors assumed you'd be holding.
None of this is history that went away. It is why a terminal-based editor cannot bind Ctrl-I and Tab to two different actions, or Ctrl-M and Enter, or Ctrl-[ and Escape — every keybinding guide for vim, tmux, and Emacs eventually hits this wall and has to stop and explain it. It is why Ctrl-C interrupts a running program: Ctrl-C is ETX, and the terminal's line discipline was wired to read an incoming ETX as "stop." It is why pasting a binary file into a terminal makes it beep, change colour, and lock up — you are feeding raw BEL, ESC, and DC3 straight into a device that still, in 2026, does very nearly what a Teletype would have done with them. The 7-bit table from 1967 is not a compatibility shim. It is the live wire your keyboard is plugged into.
Today's goal
Find one recurring thing in your life that is still running only because nobody ever switched it off — and switch it off today.
A subscription you have not opened in four months. A recurring calendar block whose original meeting was cancelled in February. A standing reminder for a deadline already past. A weekly report you generate that you are no longer certain anyone reads. A newsletter. An auto-renewal. A cron job. A login you keep "just in case."
Cospaia ran for 386 years because two surveyors filed two maps and nobody walked the border. Most lives are carrying a Cospaia or two — a small standing arrangement that persists purely because checking on it has never been anyone's job. The check costs you ten minutes. Pick the oldest one you can name, look straight at it, and decide on purpose whether it stays. If it stays, good: it is a choice now instead of an inheritance. If it goes, you have reclaimed a recurring slice of attention for the price of one cancel button.
One thing. Today. The drawer will not clear itself, and nobody is coming to walk your border.
There's a toy in the corner today on the dev fact above — a Control-key decoder. Press a key, watch the Control key strip it down to the byte it actually sends, and see exactly which keys are secretly the same key. The Tab-is-Ctrl-I collision is in there. So is the bell.
Go switch something off, friend.
— C