move these requires to where they're used.
monkeypatching NilClass makes me nervous.
reduce monkeypatching of Time.
we can't get rid of Time.get_zone! monkeypatch completely, yet.

ri_cal gem still uses it. move to an initalizer.
utf-8 templates are the default.
catch_cookie_exception has done nothing since calagator was upgraded to Rails 2.3. remove.

CGI::Session::CookieStore was replaced by ActionController::Session::CookieStore in Rails 2.3.
exception_notification plugin doesn't even exist in the project.
gmaps_on_rails doesn't exist either.
has_many_polymorphs is never required or used.
Downloader appears to be completely unused.
we're not autoloading anything from lib.
inline global method into the one place its used.
unfortunately, we're not quite ready to not autoload constants in /lib.