oh thanks!  missed that in the (wonderful) flurry of responses I got.  That works, and makes me a lot happier about the code.
.s

Stefan Borchert wrote: 
sander-martijn schrieb:
  
Anyone know of a way to query whether the user has edit rights on the 
node (no matter what their role) instead of whether they're in a 
particular role?  Then I could rewrite this in a way that is more 
maintainable.
  
    
As I wrote in my previous post: node_access('update', $node) will check 
if you (the current user) has the right to update (eq. "edit") the given 
node.

hth,

 Stefan