Curb - Libcurl bindings for Ruby
Curb (probably CUrl-RuBy or something) provides Ruby-language bindings for the libcurl(3), a fully-featured client-side URL transfer library. cURL and libcurl live at http://curl.haxx.se/ .
Curb is a work-in-progress, and currently only supports libcurl's 'easy' and 'multi' modes.
Looks speedy.