He agreed to a film adaptation of Raise the Titanic in 1980 and hated it so much he refused to allow any other adaptations of his work for the next 25 years, only to get burned again when he finally relented.

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days is a method on the Numeric class in Rails, and it creates an instance of ActiveSupport::Duration with self passed to the constructor (this is a bit of a simplification, because it actually calls the class method days on Duration which converts the number of days into seconds before creating the Duration instance).