Rails - Jul 2005 - AR object without model?

Previous to .13 I was using a generic model lookup.rb to access all my
lookup tables (named lookup_tablename_fieldname).

I could then do something like: 

  @lookup = Lookup.find_by_sql "SELECT * FROM lookup_genders"

@lookup would be an activerecord object and I could access it with
something like
for l in lookup
  puts l.description
end

With the .13 it aggressively searches for the ''lookups'' table,
which
of course doesn''t exist and raises an exception. So at first I tried
something like:

  ActiveRecord::Base.find_by_sql ''SELECT * FROM
lookup_genders''

Which raises an exception.

  ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_all ''SELECT * FROM
lookup_genders''

works, but returns an array of hashs.
Is there a way to return an AR object for a table without it having a model.rb?

Britt