[rjn945]

Happily, you're first example is actually already supported in the latest Underscore (1.6.0):

  _.each([1,2,3], _.partial(something, _, 'param'))

Example:

  _.map([1, 2, 3, 4], _.partial(Math.pow, _, 8))
  // [1, 256, 6561, 65536] 

Admittedly, "_.partial" is 3 more characters than "$.call", but if you really used it a lot, you could alias it to something short like "_p".

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be present in the latest Lo-Dash (which I generally prefer).