Nope;  If I had a better idea, I probably would have just merged this. I played a little bit of syntax bingo without success. As for looking into the public_activity code, grepping to see what class inherited from AR proved fruitless (you also don't want to know how they're extending AR). If we can't discover the proper syntax for latching into that table, this may be the easiest way of latching into our collection of activities directly.