Without writing my own alias, is there an easy way to get the class of
the current object without calling self.class?  I'm trying to call class
methods from within an instance method, and self.class.method_name is
just a little verbose for my taste.  I could do type.method_name, but
that's deprecated and not very clear.  It would be nice if just class
by itself were understood in context as the method instead of the keyword,
but since it's not, I'm sort of stuck.  Suggestions?