Weekend catch-up

I trust you all entertained yourselves over the weekend with the uncommonly good batch of puzzles that were published.

All the themeless puzzles were of similar difficulty for me—no killer puzzles. Robert Wolfe's NYT (5:58) and LAT (5:17) puzzles, Daniel Stark's Newsday Saturday Stumper (6:05), and Bob Klahn's CrosSynergy Sunday Challenge (5:58) all took me about the same amount of time. My favorite of these was the Klahn puzzle.

The Sunday themes were also a great bunch. Fred Piscop's NYT, "Foreign Accent," was a worthy challenge, and I liked how he played around with the accented pronunciations (9:43). Patrick Blindauer's Washington Post puzzle, "Backflips," upended a particular letter in each theme entry, and was jam-packed with good fill and clues (9:29). Dave Sullivan's LA Times syndicate puzzle, "Interconnectivity," had a fun theme, fun cluing, and a smattering of Scrabbly letters (7:16). Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon's LA Weekly puzzle, "Land of the Free," also had lots of good stuff in it, but the theme (all things that are "free") didn't capture my fancy—the theme clues/entries were straightforward and free of wordplay (8:18).