the great tantra challenge

on 3 march 2008, in a popular tv show, sanal edamaruku, the president of rationalist international, challenged india's most "powerful" tantri (black magician) to demonstrate his powers on him. that was the beginning of an unprecedented experiment. after all his chanting of mantra (magic words) and ceremonies of tantra failed, the tantrik decided to kill sanal edamaruku with the "ultimate destruction ceremony" on live tv. sanal eamaruku agreed and sat in the altar of the black magic ritual. india tv observed skyrocketing viewership rates. everything started, when uma bharati (former chief minister of the state of madhya pradesh) accused her political opponents in a public statement of using tantrik powers to inflict damage upon her. in fact, within a few days, the unlucky lady had lost her favorite uncle, hit the door of her car against her head and found her legs covered with wounds and blisters. india tv, one of india's major hindi channels with national outreach, invited sanal edamaruku for a discussion on "tantrik power versus science". pandit surinder sharma, who claims to be the tantrik of top politicians and is well known from his tv shows, represented the other side. during the discussion, the tantrik showed a small human shape of wheat flour dough, laid a thread around it like a noose and tightened it. he claimed that he was able to kill any person he wanted within three minutes by using black magic. sanal challenged him to try and kill him. the tantrik tried. he chanted his mantras (magic words): "om linga linga lina linga, kili kili ...." but his efforts did not show any impact on sanal — not after three minutes, and not after five. the time was extended and extended again. the original discussion program should have ended here, but the "breaking news" of the ongoing great tantra challenge was overrunning all program schedules. now the tantrik changed his technique. he started sprinkling water on sanal and brandishing a knife in front of him. sometimes he moved the blade all over his body. sanal did not flinch. then he touched sanal's head with his hand, rubbing and rumpling up his hair, pressing his forehead, laying his hand over his eyes, pressing his fingers against his temples. when he pressed harder and harder, sanal reminded him that he was supposed to use black magic only, not forceful attacks to bring him down. the tantrik took a new run: water, knife, fingers, mantras. but sanal kept looking very healthy and even amused. after nearly two hours, the anchor declared the tantrik's failure. the tantrik, unwilling to admit defeat, tried the excuse that a very strong god whom sanal might be worshipping obviously protected him. "no, i am an atheist," said sanal edamaruku. finally, the disgraced tantrik tried to save his face by claiming that there was a never-failing special black magic for ultimate destruction, which could, however, only been done at night. bad luck again, he did not get away with this, but was challenged to prove his claim this very night in another "breaking news" live program. during the next three hours, india tv ran announcements for the great tantra challenge that called several hundred million people to their tv sets. the encounter took place under the open night sky. the tantrik and his two assistants were kindling a fire and staring into the flames. sanal was in good humour. once the ultimate magic was invoked, there wouldn't be any way back, the tantrik warned. within two minutes, sanal would get crazy, and one minute later he would scream in pain and die. didn't he want to save his life before it was too late? sanal laughed, and the countdown begun. the tantriks chanted their "om linga linga linga linga, kili kili kili ...." followed by ever changing cascades of strange words and sounds. the speed increased hysterically. they threw all kinds of magic ingredients into the flames that produced changing colours, crackling and fizzling sounds and white smoke. while chanting, the tantrik came close to sanal, moved his hands in front of him and touched him, but was called back by the anchor. after the earlier covert attempts of the tantrik to use force against sanal, he was warned to keep distance and avoid touching sanal. but the tantrik "forgot" this rule again and again. now the tantrik wrote sanal's name on a sheet of paper, tore it into small pieces, dipped them into a pot with boiling butter oil and threw them dramatically into the flames. nothing happened. singing and singing, he sprinkled water on sanal, mopped a bunch of peacock feathers over his head, threw mustard seed into the fire and other outlandish things more. sanal smiled, nothing happened, and time was running out. only seven more minutes before midnight, the tantrik decided to use his ultimate weapon: the clod of wheat flour dough. he kneaded it and powdered it with mysterious ingredients, then asked sanal to touch it. sanal did so, and the grand magic finale begun. the tantrik pierced blunt nails on the dough, then cut it wildly with a knife and threw them into the fire. that moment, sanal should have broken down. but he did not. he laughed. forty more seconds, counted the anchor, twenty, ten, five ... it's over! millions of people must have uttered a sigh of relief in front their tvs. sanal was very much alive. tantra power had miserably failed. tantriks are creating such a scaring atmosphere that even people, who know that black magic has no base, can just break down out of fear, commented a scientist during the program. it needs enormous courage and confidence to challenge them by actually putting one's life at risk, he said. by doing so, sanal edamaruku has broken the spell, and has taken away much of the fear of those who witnessed his triumph. in this night, one of the most dangerous and wide spread superstitions in india suffered a severe blow.

snark of the week

jim henley @ unqualified offerings:

the following appeared this week in the new york times, the washington post, slate and the new yorker in a parallel universe ... how i got it right: looking back at a time of justified opposition to a mad, violent enterprise so many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the iraq war when it had a chance of doing good that i have had to permit mutliple publication of this article in most of the nation's elite media venues — collecting, i am almost embarrassed to admit, a separate fee from each. everyone recognizes that the opinions of those of us who were right about iraq then are crucial to formulating sane, just policy now. it's a lot of pressure, so please forgive anything glib or short you read herein: between articles, interviews, think-tank panels and presentations before government agencies and policy organs i'm not permitted to mention, i'm a little frazzled. on the bright side, and i can confirm that my experience has been similar to those of my fellow prophets, being the object of so much attention, being repeatedly quizzed by eager interlocutors on the same basic points, encourages one to distill one's thinking to its essence. as kenneth pollack asked me the other day, "what the fuck was so special about you, anyway?" "for one thing," i said, "i am not sprawled on a sidewalk next the mcpherson square metro station, hoping to cadge enough quarters to enjoy the rare treat of laundering the vomit out of the only shirt i own, praying all the while that decent people do not recognize me beneath the matted beard and tangled hair." "but my thigh hurts!" he said. "shut up," i consoled him, "or i'll kick it again." still he had a way of arriving at the essential question: "what the fuck was so special about me, anyway?" why did i have the sense to oppose the us conquest of iraq when so many of our great and good supported it? sometimes i think the other question is almost more interesting: what the fuck were those other people thinking? alas, answers to that one are hard to come by, since understandable shame has closed many mouths. so my own side of the story will have to suffice. why was i right and you, if you were a powerful politician or respected pundit in 2002-2003, wrong? some guesses follow. i'm really very bright. i don't like to brag, but my iq places me in the 99th percentile of americans. odds are, for instance, that i am smarter than you. and if i'm not, you're probably not that much smarter than i am. and even if you are, it would be unseemly for you to say so. what are you, stuck up or something? you aside, i'm certainly smarter than the president, or doug feith, or joe klein. i am seventeen times as smart as senator joseph lieberman. i am twenty-five hundred percent brighter than gop presidential candidate john mccain. my superior intelligence is a superficially plausible explanation, and i don't discount it, but two immediate objections suggest themselves. first, and less crucially, it simply raises another question: how did i get so smart in the first place? the shortest answer is, "because my parents were smart, and their parents were smart too." it's very hard to say why that matters: iq appears to be substantially heritable, but it's hard to disentangle the genetic component from the environmental nevertheless — i was reared by my parents, and not, as you know, by yours. if i'd been reared by yours i'd have gotten more toys as a kid. we were poor and you, somewhat spoiled. distressingly, there's no practical program for improvement there. "be smarter!" we might say to doug feith, "you'll make better policy!" but doug feith can't go back in time and be born to other people. but in light of the second objection to the "intelligence theory," that probably doesn't matter. second objection: you didn't have to be all that bright to oppose the iraq war in advance. heck, polls suggest that most americans were dubious about the idea until the war became obviously inevitable. real enthusiasm was confined to the elite media, the bipartisan defense-policy establishment and a bunch of republican quasi-intellectuals who had spent ten years casting about for different countries to have a war — any war — with. i mean, for crying out loud, at one point our rulers declared that saddam hussein might attack america with remote-controlled model planes. you didn't have to wait to bounce that one off the folks at your next mensa meeting to judge its likelihood. nor did you have to puzzle overlong, if someone tried to put that one by you, how much stock you should put in anything else that came out of their mouths. conclusion: my manifest intelligence was definitely not necessary to opposing the iraq war. it may not have been sufficient either. i wasn't born yesterday. i had heard of the middle east before september 12, 2001. i knew that many of the loudest advocates for war with iraq were so-called national-greatness conservatives who spent the 1990s arguing that war was good for the soul. i remembered elliott abrams and john poindexter and michael ledeen as the knaves and fools of iran-contra, and drew the appropriate conclusions about the bush administration wanting to employ them: it was an administration of knaves and fools. people will object that the project for a new american century had heard of the middle east before september 12, 2001 too, so just knowing some things wasn't enough. and hey, true, but if you read"warbloggers"back in 2001-2003, the thing that really jumped out was how new all this foreign-policy stuff was to them. people without much knowledge on the subject went looking for someone to soothe a very real hurt they felt in september 2001, and the first people they ran into were raving, nationalistic morons with a preexisting agenda, clustered around the wall street journal and the weekly standard. libertarianism. as a libertarian, i was primed to react skeptically to official pronouncements. "hayek doesn't stop at the water's edge!" i coined that one. not bad, huh? i could tell the difference between the government and the country. people who couldn't make this distinction could not rationally cope with the idea that american foreign policy was the largest driver of anti-american terrorism because it sounded to them too much like "the american people deserve to be victims of terrorism." i could see the self-interest of the officials pushing for war — how war would benefit their political party, their department within the government, enhance their own status at the expense of rivals. libertarianism made it clear how absurd the idealistic case was. supposedly, wise, firm and just american guidance would usher iraq into a new era of liberalism and comity. but none of that was going to work unless real american officials embedded in american political institutions were unusually selfless and astute, with a lofty and omniscient devotion to iraqi welfare. and, you know, they weren't going to be that. finally-er, being neither republican nor democrat meant that i wasn't unduly impressed when even tom friedman, or even some clinton administration hack, assured everyone that the tinpot ruler of a two-bit despotism eight-thousand miles away would and could destroy us if we didn't get him first. here there are a number of objections. all too many self-described libertarians supported the iraq war, with that noxious fervor for which we are notorious. these people were led astray by a combination of noble and base tendencies within libertarianism. saddam hussein was a vicious tyrant, after all, and some libertarians let a commendable hatred of tyrants overrule their common sense. some libertarians remembered that war involved guns, and lots of them, and figured it must be good. and many feared that if the united states did not go to war, it might make some hippie, somewhere, happy. the more telling objection is that you didn't have to be a libertarian to figure out that going to war with iraq made even less sense than driving home to east egg drunk off your ass and angry at your spouse. any number of leftists and garden-variety liberals, and even a handful of conservatives, figured it out, each for different reasons. this objection has the disadvantage of being obviously true. what all of us had in common is probably a simple recognition: war is a big deal. it isn't normal. it's not something to take up casually. any war you can describe as "a war of choice" is a crime. war feeds on and feeds the negative passions. it is to be shunned where possible and regretted when not. various hawks occasionally protested that "of course" they didn't enjoy war, but they were almost always lying. anyone who saw invading foreign lands and ruling other countries by force as extraordinary was forearmed against the lies and delusions of the time. it's a heavy burden, i'll admit. but the riches and fame make it all worthwhile.

quote of the day

born-again democrat john cole @ balloon juice:

my iraq war retrospective i see that andrew sullivan was asked to list what he got wrong about iraq for the five year anniversary of the invasion, and since i was as big a war booster as anyone, i thought i would list what i got wrong: everything. and i don’t say that to provide people with an easy way to beat up on me, but i do sort of have to face facts. i was wrong about everything. i was wrong about the doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. i was wrong about iraq possessing wmd. i was wrong about scott ritter and the inspections. i was wrong about the un involvement in weapons inspections. i was wrong about the containment sanctions. i was wrong about the broader impact of the war on the middle east. i was wrong about this making us more safe. i was wrong about the number of troops needed to stabilize iraq. i was wrong when i stated this administration had a clear plan for the aftermath. i was wrong about securing the ammunition dumps. i was wrong about the ease of bringing democracy to the middle east. i was wrong about dissolving the iraqi army. i was wrong about the looting being unimportant. i was wrong that bush/cheney were competent. i was wrong that we would be greeted as liberators. i was wrong to make fun of the anti-war protestors. i was wrong not to trust the dirty smelly hippies. i mean, i could go down the list and continue on, but you get the point. i was wrong about EVERY. GOD. DAMNED. THING. it is amazing i could tie my shoes in 2001-2004. if you took all the wrongness i generated, put it together and compacted it and processed it, there would be enough concentrated stupid to fuel three hundred years of weekly standard journals. i am not sure how i snapped out of it, but i think abu ghraib and the negative impact of the insurgency did sober me up a bit. war should always be an absolute last resort, not just another option. i will never make the same mistakes again.

breaking, part deux: pot, kettle death-cage rematch!

christian-philosopher-king-in-chief george w. bush, speechifyin' before the dept. of homeland security, and indulging in a texas-sized dose of good ol'-fashion projection:

we're in a battle with evil men — i call them evil because if you murder the innocent to achieve a political objective, you're evil.

... unless, of course, you're someone engaged in "constructive chaos". biiiiig difference, folks. like huge.

finally, flowers

then:

"think of the faces in afghanistan when the people were liberated, when they moved out in the streets and they started singing and flying kites and women went to school and people were able to function and other countries were able to start interacting with them. that's what would happen in iraq." — defense secretary donald rumsfeld, 9/13/02 "as i told the president on january 10th, i think they will be greeted with sweets and flowers in the first months and simply have very, very little doubts that that is the case." — iraqi exile kanan makiya, 3/17/03

now:

baghdad — pomp and ceremony greeted iranian president mahmoud ahmadinejad on his arrival in iraq on sunday, the fanfare a stark contrast to the rushed and secretive visits of his bitter rival u.s. president george w. bush. ahmadinejad held hands with iraqi president jalal talabani as they walked down a red carpet to the tune of their countries' national anthems, his visit the first by an iranian president since the two neighbours fought a ruinous war in the 1980s. his warm reception, in which he was hugged and kissed by iraqi officials and presented with flowers by children, was iraq's first full state welcome for any leader since the u.s.-led invasion to topple saddam hussein in 2003. — reuters, 3/2/08

all that's missing are the meanies

the latest custom vehicle icon for the garmin nüvi gps series takes a decidedly more whimsical turn:

NOTICE: these custom icons that i make freely available are not for resale!

actual size: (click to download)

close-up:

my previous custom vehicles icons, which includes various batmobiles from the 40s, 50s, 60s and 00s, as well as speed racer's mach 5, can be downloaded from my previous posts all that's missing is the "pow!" and aarrgghhz carz.

breaking: pot, kettle collide

decider-in-chief george w. bush commenting on turkey's offensives in northern iraq:

the turks need to move quickly, achieve their objective, and get out.

sounds like good advice to me, george.

ruh row*

at the beginning of february, the runaway train that is the republican party crashed another siding:

top house republicans were told in recent days that a former employee of their campaign committee may have forged an official audit during the contentious 2006 election cycle and that they should brace for the possibility that an unfolding investigation could uncover financial improprieties stretching back several years, according to gop sources briefed on the members-only discussions. the national republican congressional committee has retained a forensic auditor to review its accounting for the last several election cycles, the sources said. the nrcc’s accounting problems were discussed during two high-level conference calls between senior gop lawmakers on friday and monday night, according to republicans briefed on the calls. “there is a sense that this could be very damaging to the committee,” said a republican insider close to the gop leadership.

"damaging"? y'think?

i can't imagine that the republicans — whose fundraising prowess has wilted since 2006 — are too thrilled at the prospect of having the fbi open a criminal audit on their finances, which threatens to shutter their coffers during a crucial campaign year.

every financial advangtage the gop has enjoyed over the last few election cycles has evaporated. with the piggy bank locked up, added to the steadily accumulating retirements, special election losses and indictments, november 2008 looms as the year historians will mark as "the republican diaspora".

* see "scooby doo".

could be worse

so you think the obama-clinton fights at liberal blogs daily kos, booman tribune and mydd are nasty?

associated press: norristown, pa. — montgomery county authorities say a man stabbed his brother-in-law during an argument over who should get the democratic nomination for president. what's more, jose ortiz, 28, who's charged with felony assault, is a registered republican. district attorney risa ferman said ortiz supports hillary clinton and sean shurelds supports barack obama. she told reporters monday that the two got into an argument in a collegeville home thursday night and shurelds tried to choke ortiz. she says ortiz then stabbed shurelds in the abdomen. shurelds was taken to a hospital in critical condition, but is expected to recover.

afaik, no one on those blogs has had to take a trip to the emergency room ... yet.

quote of the day

atrios @ eschaton channeling republican front-runner john mccain:

the war is over. but it will continue forever. but the Iraqis will handle everything. but our troops need to stay there anyway.

there's a certain mad poetry at work here ...

all that's missing is the "pow!"

yes, i'm back with another custom vehicle icon for the garmin nüvi gps series, for the most famous batmobile of them all — quite possibly the most famous car in the world:

(doesn't that kid ever use the door?)

i have to thank the bat-fans at 1966batmobile.com for their veritable treasure trove of reference material.

(yes, that is the bat-extinguisher nestled between the seats.)

so you can choose from a growing list of bat-vehicles:

... to suit your mood on your next pulse-pounding mission to restock your bat-veggies!

NOTICE: these custom icons that i make freely available are not for resale!

actual size: (click to download)

close-up:

my previous custom vehicles icons, which include the tumbler batmobile, and models from the 40s and 50s, as well as speed racer's mach 5, can be downloaded from my previous post aarrgghhz carz.

aarrgghhz carz

my garmin nüvi gps device custom vehicle icons, which i introduced in the posts "chicks dig the car" and "more cars that chicks dig", are now available in one convenient download:

NOTICE: these custom icons that i make freely available are not for resale!

1940s batmobile:

1950s batmobile:

2005 "tumbler" batmobile:

1967 "speed racer" mach 5:

with great icons comes great responsibility, so remember, drive wisely.

more cars that chicks dig

yes, we're at it again with more garmin nüvi gps device vehicle icons — this time it's the 2005 "tumbler" batmobile from "batman begins".

this time, instead of photographing toys, i used computer-generated 3d models. in fact the tumbler model — one of many freely available at foundation3d — was so impressively detailed (360,000 polygons) that my machine suffered a big-time performance hit. my program of choice, lightwave 3d, crashed like a subprime lender.

NOTICE: these custom icons that i make freely available are not for resale!

actual size: (click to download)

close up:

all that's missing is the roar of a jet engine ...

and yes, as you can see in the snapshot of the selection screen, also new on the menu is the legendary mach 5 from the classic 60's cartoon tv series "speed racer":

unlike the tumbler, which i found online, i built this model myself using lightwave:

NOTICE: these custom icons that i make freely available are not for resale!

actual size: (click to download)

close up:

out on the town:

and all that's missing is the roar of the crowds ...

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update:

all my custom icons are now available in one convenient download.

giuliani campaign '08: r.i.p.

to all but the very last of his desperate disciples, the ruination of giuliani's ascension to washington was all but foretold in scripture. it is only fitting that the trajectory of his heavenly rise and meteoric fall be properly documented, if only in part, to the best of my mortal powers, in this humble shrine:

(i) the adoration of the magi mayor:

moses ... or rudy, america's mayor, has come down from the mountaintop with "the twelve committments" ...

---

(ii) the gospel according to you-know-who:

bryan wiliams: ... these frequent — some would say constant — mentions of 9-11, you've trailed off a little bit lately ... rudy: y'know — y'know, bryan, i don't, i don't think that's correct.

---

(iii) the crucifixtion and burial:

tom brokaw: ... that whole conventional wisdom that he made a mistake in not going into iowa and new hampshire — i think he might have been out earlier if he had gone to iowa or new hampshire, or even to south carolina. look, he had a lot of baggage that began to develop ...

bob wright and francis fukuyama:

francis fukuyama: ... and [giuliani] has built his entire candidacy out of a kind of morbid 9-11 nostalgia ... saying [chuckling] if you really liked, uh, if you like 9-11, y'know, and everything that's happened since then, you'll get more of it with me ...

gotta love bob's reaction ...

josh marshall:

... the funny thing about rudy is that while he ran on 'staying on offense' against islamic bad guys, his whole race was defined by running away from fights. we've talked a lot about his alleged 'strategy' of ignoring the early races and focusing all his energy on florida which would launch him to glory on super tuesday. and it's an open secret that this 'strategy' was really more a work-in-progress rationalization for his collapse of support in the early states. rudy, i believe, outspent everyone in new hampshire. and he campaigned there a lot. but it's more than that. if you look closely, every time it didn't look like it was going to be an easy victory in a state, rudy's campaign packed up and left. or not quite packed up, but basically backed out, made an occasional visit, said it'd be nice to win but that it wasn't really necessary. it was somewhat the case in iowa, totally the case in new hampshire and the same in south carolina too. i think it was the same basically in michigan, though i'm not as familiar with the particulars there. ... with rudy, he just finally ran out of places to run.

abc news:

[fellow former new york mayor] ed koch, who has feuded with giuliani for years, was delighted with giuliani's crushing defeat in florida. he crowed, before the final votes were even tallied, that he was certain the verdict by florida's voters "will drive a stake through his heart. the beast is dead."

---

(iv) the resurrection:

i don't anticipate one. quite possibly the greatest story never to be told.

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update: from the l.a. times ... (h/t josh marshall)

the failed campaign of rudolph w. giuliani can claim one distinction: the worst bang for the buck 1 of any delegate winner in presidential politics history. the former new york mayor, who dropped his republican bid for the presidency this week, disclosed thursday in a filing with the federal election commission that he raised $58.5 million and spent $48.8 million in 2007. with his donors' money, giuliani captured a single national delegate, in nevada. at that rate, it would have taken close to $60 billion in spending to capture the 1,191 delegates needed to win the nomination.

1 to be fair to "america's mayor", anyone who spent money on the nomination who failed to get any delegates at all would have a worse bang for their buck.

chicks dig the car

robin: i want a car, chicks dig the car. batman: this is why superman works alone. — batman and robin, 1997

i've had my garmin nüvi 350 gps navigator for over a year now and the moment that i learned that i could craft my own custom vehicle icons for it i knew i had to have my very own ...

but which one? even with 60 years of different models to choose from, the choice was actually quite simple:

... if only because i just happen to have a die-cast replica that i bought for $6 on naked impulse at my local rite aid last summer:

the resource file that the nüvi uses for the vehicle icon is a specialized png file (a format popularized for its support of alpha transparency). the png consists of 36 80x80 pixel perspective and 36 70x70 pixel overhead views of the vehicle on a 2880x150 pixel sheet:

detail of smart car png file by mad mike

i cut a turntable from a cardboard box with a compass and marked lightly in pencil 10 degree intervals along its circumference. i then mounted the replica on the turntable with a twist tie around the front axle. the turntable itself was mounted on a box by a flathead nail thru its center:

and from there it was just a process of shoot ...

... turn, shoot ...

... turn, shoot ...

as you can see, the lack of anything other than 60w home lighting put an unappealing dull brown cast on everything, but dealing with icky raw material like this is one of the reasons photoshop was invented.

all the photos were imported as individual layers into a single file and their backgrounds painted out.

the background was widened 3700% (36x), then the layers moved rightward (using a macro to save wear and tear on my arrow keys and my index finger and my brain). the layers were then merged into one. the process was repeated in a second file for the overhead shots. the background of the first file is resized vertically to accomodate the overhead shots, which were pasted in. the two layers were again merged in order to color-correct all the images simultaneously. it would have been nice if all this had taken only as long to do as it does to say ...

time to shrink the combined file to its final size. a white halo was added to increase visibility. (red background added here to highlight halo.) a png copy is saved.

of course no project with this many steps is without its unforseen obstacles. for the present there is only one conversion utility — ezran's web-based png2srf at techmods.net — available for getting the png into the specialized garmin format. unfortunately it has an issue with photoshop-generated pngs, which presents problems with transparency:

at the suggestion of a member of gps enthusiast forum poifactory.com, i downloaded the apparently garmin-friendly ¹ open source image editor paint.net, which unfortunately first required installing tinyxp (a stripped-down version of windows xp pro), using virtual pc (i'm on a mac powerbook), then installing ms .net framework, and after sitting through progress bar after progress bar after progress bar, i finally got to drive around in one of those cars that chicks really dig:

NOTICE: these custom icons that i make freely available are not for resale!

actual size: (click to download)

close-up:

... afterthought:

oh, and did i mention that i also have corgi's 1940s-era batmobile ... ?

NOTICE: these custom icons that i make freely available are not for resale!

actual size: (click to download)

close-up:

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update:

all my custom icons are now available in one convenient download.

1 i've since heard (always after the fact) that the mac-native open source image editor seashore is also supposed to be garmin-friendly. UPDATE: forget about seashore — i've since learned that it's not garmin-friendly.