02:19 pm - Mac OS X _answer_: startup command for an instance of Terminal?
Regarding last night's/this morning's question: someone on "that mailing list" with stronger Google-fu found me a script that does what I want. I still think this should have been as easy as sticking '-e' on the end of xerm is, but now that I've stashed that script in /usr/local/bin, it has been made that easy so I can stop thinking about it. Yay!