This makes sense to me.  Is defining the `*args` splat a safety to allow us to pass arbitrary values in the future?  I admit I never use splats so I'm not too familiar with them.  Do we need it, or can we just have the methods defined without it? (From some cursory Googling it looks like there are some differences between splat implementation from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9, and if we can avoid having plugin contributors having to think about any of that it could be good...