Well, I was just totally sold by Adam, the idea being that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect.
From http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/railsconf-2007 via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch