LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Numbers Game”
Prompt: MGWCC #897 — “Numbers Game” — This puzzle’s contest answer is something you might eat for breakfast.
Answer: COUNT CHOCULA, found by 329 solvers, 272 of which were solo solves

Seven theme entries in last week’s unusually-sized meta, each of which ended with the name of a city in parentheses:

17-A: [Welfare option (Madrid)] = BASIC INCOME
24-A: [Mexican delicacy whose less-appealing English name is “corn smut” (Paris)] = HUITLACOCHE. What? You had never heard of this before? I can’t believe it! Oh, wait — neither had I.
30-A: [Posted (London)] = STATIONED
40-A: [Investigations demanded by the people (Montreal)] = [PUBLIC INQUIRIES]
49-A: [Peter Gene Hernandez, to his fans (Buenos Aires)] = BRUNO MARS. Two e’s in each name! Go his parents.
60-A: [Rabbis interpret it (Mumbai)] = HALAKHIC LAW
70-A: [America’s Cup entrant (Hamburg)] = RACING YACHT

What’s the common thread? Each contains the name of a number in the dominant language of the parenthetical city:

BASIC INCOME = CINCO, Spanish for 5
HUITLACOCHE = HUIT, French for 8
STATIONED, ONE, English for 1
PUBLIC INQUIRIES, French for 5
BRUNO MARS = UNO, Italian for 1
HALAKHIC LAW, LAKH, Hindi for 100,000. As with Texas, everything’s bigger in India. They have two (AFAIK it’s only two) special numbers similar to English’s “dozen” and “score,” but LAKH = 100,000 and crore = 10 million.
RACING YACHT = ACHT, German for 8

Solvers tried a number of tactics of varying complexity, but as a Week 2 of 5 the mechanism was quite simple: just take the first letters of those seven to get CHOCULA, and you counted to get there so our cereal is contest answer COUNT CHOCULA, found by 329 solvers.

On to Week 3 of 5…

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This puzzle’s contest answer is a five-letter word somewhere on this page (the puzzle’s page, not the website’s page!).