So, when I cat /dev/input/mouse0 in a TTY, move the mouse around a bit, and then ctrl-z to stop cat, my terminal characters are all messed up. Almost every single character gets swapped out for another character in the ASCII character set. This same situation occurs when I execute this in Python 3.2:

print('033[1;12mTest.033[1;m')

The the same symptom does not appear on a shell in the GUI, only on the virtual terminals. The problem does not go away if I log out. I suspect that a certain escape code (which may be contained within the Python code) is remapping the ASCII byte codes to the character representations, but that is just a guess. What is happening and how do I undo it?