UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 8: ordinal not in range(128)

[mgedmin]

I've an UWSGI-based irclog2html deployment that fails to render the index page with the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/irclog2html/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/irclog2html/irclogserver.py", line 213, in application
    dir_listing(stream, chan_path)
  File "/opt/irclog2html/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/irclog2html/irclogserver.py", line 116, in dir_listing
    % (quote_plus(channel.name), escape(channel.name)),
  File "/opt/irclog2html/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/irclog2html/irclog2html.py", line 354, in escape
    s = s.replace('&', '&amp;').replace('<', '&lt;').replace('>', '&gt;').replace('"', '&quot;')
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 8: ordinal not in range(128)

This is on Python 2.7.

My irclogs tree has a directory named '#gnome-'$'\020''�s��'$'\177', which is a result of a terrible irssi accident, I expect.

[mgedmin]

Git calls that directory "#gnome-\020\357\277\275s\357\277\275\357\277\275\177".

Removing it fixes the Unicode error.