From: "rmagick@..." Date: 2005-09-08T00:06:29+09:00 Subject: Re: weird keyword parameters in rails Check out p. 361 in the Pickaxe 2nd Ed. In a method call, the initial parameters may be followed by "a list of key => value pairs. These pairs are collected into a single new Hash object and passed as a single parameter." In your example, "method" would get a hash argument with 1 key-value pair.