While carefully constructing the friendly about section earlier today, I noticed that, should an article fail to receive any tags, it would be left with an annoying "Tags:" text and, misleadingly enough, no tags. This makes various baby animals the world over quite sad indeed, so it must be fixed.
My first idea was to dive into the layout and try something to the tune of :

{% unless article.tags.empty? %} Tags: {{ article | linked_tag_list }}{% endunless %}

While this did not actually do anything useful, it did bring to light the fact that my understanding of liquid is laughable, at best. Grep safely in hand, i went deeper and came across this lovely piece of code in 'app\drops\article_drop.rb':

def initialize(source, options = {})
    super source
    @options  = options
    @liquid.update \
      'body'            => @source.body_html,
      'excerpt'         => (@source.excerpt_html.blank? ? nil : @source.excerpt_html),
      'accept_comments' => @source.accept_comments?,
      'is_page_home'    => (options[:page] == true)
  end

Being the horrible person that I am, I added

'tagged'          => !@source.tags.empty?,

Luckily enough, the universe didn't collapse and i could now use

{% if article.tagged %} Tags: {{ article | linked_tag_list }}{% endif %}

Please note that if anybody tries making sense and pointing out that there is no sane reason why an article wouldn't be tagged, i will make up at least 20 reasons, one of which will involve string theories and pandas. You have been warned.

Shameful later edit
Thanks to Cristi i now know what the right way to go about the above problem would have been, namely

{% unless article.tags == empty %} Tags: {{ article | linked_tag_list }}{% endunless %}

After postponing putting up a blog about my many and diverse ruby adventures, i finally sat down for a couple of minutes and put this up. Going through the regular motions of installing mephisto, it all seemed ok until i tried to log into the admin account. Then - disaster ! Mephisto died mercilessly stating that

NoMethodError (undefined method `extract_options_from_args!' for #)

After some grepping i found the function in activerecord base, in an earlier version of rails :

def extract_options_from_args!(args) #:nodoc:
  args.last.is_a?(Hash) ? args.pop : {}
end

The whole thing originates in the acts_as_paranoid plugin, so basically you can either patch that with the function definition, replace the call to the function, or just be a horrible human being and patch your edge rails with the function. Whichever way you choose to take, it should fix the issue.

Later edit
As BradC points out, the intended replacement for extract_options_from_args! is args.extract_options!. As such, replacing line 75 of paranoid.rb to

options = args.extract_options!

would not make you a horrible person, quite on the contrary, it would make you a lovely one !