I edited it in pico instead of emacs and I was able to remove the
^M's. Strangely, it seems that emacs is smart enough that it
recognizes that this is a Mac file, and it keeps everything in "Mac
mode". What this means, frustrating enough, is that you can't
edit out the ^M characters. I guess it probably has some facility
for translating back and forth, but I couldn't figure it out, so pico
fixed the problem for now.
