Marie

@Ιασων You just think that because you've never had horchata, which is delicious (and also African, brought to the New World by way of Spain, so 100% not Americana). :-) As for the others, to be fair, it *is* an American newspaper... and y'all Europeans have your highland cow there prominently in the center!

@Shimmer Besides which, it could be either COTTO or COTTA depending on the gender of the thing being baked, and HIYO is every bit as good a greeting as HIYA. (I had this "wrong" (i.e., the other right) and it took me forever to figure out what the puzzle was asking for.) That's just a terrible crossing and should have been nixed or clued differently.

@Gregg Same! I thought that cross should have been clued differently given the very high obscurity level of SAMBAR!

@K Barrett Oh I hope that is what it is -- some lame attempt to make the boxes look like scrabble tiles. The highlighting is distracting and awful, and on my screen the highlight box sometimes blocks out part of the neighboring letter. Just terrible.

@Steve The way I parsed it (once I knew what it was cluing) was that "etc." had the crosswordy opportunity to play double duty. In addition to applying to the collective ".1111, .2222, .3333", if you apply "etc." to the individual numbers, they become repeating decimals: ".1111 etc" is the same as ".1111...". Not sure if that was intentional, but I thought it was extremely elegant (and also mathematically accurate).

@Pezhead What does "flyspecking" mean in this context? I saw somebody else use that in these comments and have never heard that term before.