Health check for Cassandra connection (using hector)?

With CQL3, I'm using the following query:

SELECT now() FROM system.local;

It would be nice to get rid of the FROM clause altogther to make this generic, in case the user does not have access to the system keyspace or local column family for some reason. But as with the other answers, at least this should not give false positives.

The solution I'm currently using, and which seems to be the most robust so far (tested with Cassandra 1.1 and 1.2) is a simple query on "system":

Query<String> query = Query.selectQuery("*", "system", null, 1, consistencyLevel, StringSerializer.get());

It's not exactly what I wanted since it's a "real" query, but on the other hand it doesn't give any false positives.