Korean rice dish often served in a hot stone bowl / SAT 2-5-22 / Like the villainous Max Shreck at the end of Batman Returns / Russian writer and dissident Limonov / Bygone Vatican money / Eponym of lifetime achievement award in fashion since 1984 / Archetypal bossypants

Constructor: Kameron Austin Collins

Relative difficulty: Medium (i.e. properly hard but not brutal)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: AD LITEM (11D: Appointed by the court) —

Ad litem (Latin: "for the suit"^[1]) is a term used in law to refer to the appointment by a court of one party to act in a lawsuit on behalf of another party such as a child or an incapacitated adult, who is deemed incapable of representing him or herself. An individual who acts in this capacity is generally called a guardian ad litem in such legal proceedings; in Scotland, curator ad litem is the equivalent term. In England and Wales, since the amendment of the Children Act 1989 established the role of children's guardian, the term is now used only in the term "guardian ad litem" in Private Law proceedings under rule 9.5. The United States legal system, which at its inception was based on the English legal system, continues to use the terms "guardian ad litem" and "attorney ad litem". The legal system in the Republic of Ireland also uses the term guardian ad litem.

The term is also used in property litigation, where a person may be appointed to act on behalf of an estate in court proceedings, when the estate's proper representatives are unable or unwilling to act.

The term is also sometimes used to refer to a judge who participates in only a particular case or a limited set of cases and does not have the same status as the other judges of the court. Such a jurist is more commonly called a judge ad hoc. Judges ad hoc are particularly common in international courts, and are fewer in number elsewhere.

The Latin term (ād lītem) translates literally as "for the suit" or "for the proceeding". (wikipedia)

• • •

Now that's a Saturday. That hit the Saturday sweet spot for me, dead center. It's very hard to make a puzzle that is both very tough and very delightful, and this one pulls it off beautifully. Usually, if I have to struggle a lot, it's because of obscure garbage or because of clues that think they are being clever but are actually being extremely tenuous. The lovely thing about this puzzle—and it's at least somewhat a product of the grid structure—is that, with the exception of the NW and SE corners, I never felt like I might get trapped. There always seemed to be another path to find, another route around whatever roadblock had flung itself in my way. Also, the puzzle alternated moods, rewarding me with some colorful gimmes (or near gimmes), but then punishing me with ambiguity or legal Latin or some reality show contestant's first name. A real rollercoaster, this one, but it did what rollercoasters are supposed to do: thrill me, not give me whiplash or make me barf. I will say that there was one part of the puzzle, one square, that seemed borderline unfair to me, and unsurprisingly, it involved the crossing of two proper nouns at a vowel (the thing that should set off All The Alarm Bells with constructors / editors). But I'm realizing now that it felt unfair because I was getting my Congressional CORYs mixed up, i.e. despite what the clue obviously says, in my head it was referring to CORI Bush, not CORY Booker (damn, they even have the same initials, and same-sounding syllables opening their last names!). If you are reading the clue correctly, then you know you're dealing with the senator from New Jersey, Booker, who is a man, and not the representative from Missouri, Bush, who is a woman. Because he's a man, CORY Booker would not (in all probability) spell his name CORI. So even if you assumed that RIDERS was spelled like that, with an "I," the normal way, you'd have to change it to accommodate CORY, who is, in fact, famous enough to take this crossing out of Natick territory. That is, he's very famous (in the U.S.), and so you can be expected to know his name, and infer the "Y" spelling. Don't do what I did and get CORI Bush involved. *Do* put CORI Bush in your puzzles, though ... just watch that last vowel! (And in case you're wondering, COREY Feldman spells it with an "E"):

After a small struggle in the NW, I finished it up and then peeked my head around the corner into the center of the grid, and instantly ... whoosh! 

GATEWAY DRUG becomes gateway answer as I go flying into the fat middle of the grid. I picked up SPRAY-ON TANS not long thereafter, off just the "-PR-," and so I really thought I might make relatively short work of this thing, but then the Saturdayness of it all kicked in. I had no memory of "Batman Returns," so TASED was hard. I had COWER before LOWER (27A: Humble), so LATKE was surprisingly difficult (27D: Holiday pancake). Having a "C" in the initial position, and having "pancake" in the clue, caused me to write in CREPE there! Awful pitfall. No idea about BECCA. Found the PACKED part of PACKED HOUSE really hard to turn up—could not make good sense of "selling out" (32A: Result of selling out). Wanted SCUMS before CRUDS (30D: Disgusting buildups). Thought PONTE ended in an "A" (!?) (24D: ___ Vecchio). So that COWER / LOWER screw-up had cascading repercussions, and the PACKED part of the grid was a real struggle. The most obscure thing to me was AD LITEM. I knew I was dealing with legal Latin, but I just couldn't come up with any plausible Latin noun (in the objective case) to fill the space. Sigh. EDUARD was also obscure to me, but I could at least build a plausible name out of the letters I got from crosses. I literally exclaimed "oh no!" toward the end when I got to [blank]-TESTS (37D: Nonproliferation treaty subjects, in brief), because my experience seeing this clue / answer type (crosswordese going Way back), is that any one of three letters might occupy that first position: A (Atomic), H (Hydrogen), or N (Nuclear). So after an out-loud "oh no!" my brain went into a silent "please be obvious please be obvious please be obvious" prayer, and thankfully DIN was obliging (35A: It's a racket). Speaking of answered prayers, one of my favorite moments of the solve came toward the end, as I was just about to enter my final corner, the southeast. I took one look at 46A: Sugar substitute?, took another look at what I had in the grid (SN-), and then I just threw down the first thing that came to mind: a cutesy and old-fashioned term of affection that made me smile so broadly that I actually said, out loud, "please be right please be right please be right...."

And it was so. Ask and ye shall receive! Amen.

Explainers:

• 25D: Eponym of a lifetime achievement award in fashion since 1984 (BEENE) — That's Geoffrey BEENE
• 1A: Birdie of Broadway's "Bye Bye Birdie" (CONRAD) — I've seen the movie with Ann-Margret but I forgot that the title character's first name was CONRAD. He's the teen idol who gets drafted and then ends up in the middle of a publicity stunt involving his singing a song called "One Last Kiss" on the Ed Sullivan Show, and then actually giving "one last kiss" to some lucky member of his fan club, on air ... you probably know all this. I'm just reminding myself. 
• 42A: Sayings attributed to Jesus (LOGIA) — "communications of divine origin"; not to be confused with actor Robert (two-G) LOGGIA, though (speaking of "communications of divine origin") LOGGIA did play Joseph in "The Greatest Story Ever Told":

• 16A: Korean rice dish often served in a hot stone bowl (BIBIMBAP) — got that last vowel right this time! Not "MMMBOP" but "Mmm .. BIBIMBAP!" Hurray, memory!
• 17D: The right one can produce a smile (PARENTHESIS) — think "emoticon" ... the right (not left!!) PARENTHESIS is the smile in the smiley face emoticon :)
• 32D: Like early uncensored Hollywood films (PRE-CODE) — the Hays Code, which went into effect in 1934, severely limited the amount of sex, crime, nudity, etc. you could show on film. PRE-CODE films can seem pretty racy, at times, by Classic Hollywood ('30s-'50s) standards. Always expect to see at least one film clue in KAC's puzzles (he's a film critic for Rolling Stone).

LOL

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]