Passing infinity as a timestamp value in Ruby

I have run into a situation in Ruby on Rails-3.0.5 wherein the
framework attempts to set unreferenced columns to their default
values as extracted from the DBMS. However, it cannot handle
infinity as a datetime class, which evidently is what AR maps
timestamps to, and so attempts to insert NULL instead. As there is
a NOT NULL constraint on that column the INSERT always fails.

How would one pass a value of 'infinity' to PostgreSQL in this case.
Am I constrained to hand craft an SQL INSERT query?

I have raised the issue on the Rails Core list but if a solution to
this problem is known to anyone here then I would like to learn of
it.

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