Pittsburgh-bred/Atlanta-based singer
KELS
is known for her powerful vocals and rootsy blend of soul, pop, and
R&B. She broke through with her 2025 single "Gone," and delivered her
debut EP, Dirty Blues Princess, in 2026.
Born Kelsey Anne Hillock in 1995 in Germany to an American military
family, KELS grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she started singing
and performing at a young age. She studied both jazz and classical opera
privately, before starting to write her own songs. Drawing inspiration
from artists like Sarah Vaughan, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, and Amy
Winehouse, she built a local following and released a string of
independently released singles. Around 2023, she relocated to Atlanta,
Georgia where she continued to garner attention, embarked on a self-funded
52-show U.S. tour, and headlined at the 2024 Atlanta Jazz Festival. In
2025, she released the single "Gone," posting a live, one-take performance
on social media that went viral. A year later, she released her debut EP,
Dirty Blues Princess, which featured "Gone" along with the singles "6 ft
Under" and "Daddy's Not the One."
As Dolly Parton told Stevie Ray Vaughn, it costs a lot of money to look
that cheap.
Multnomah County, Ore., agreed on Wednesday to eliminate all race-based housing programs as part of a voluntary compliance agreement with the Trump administration, which had alleged that the county's "culturally specific" services—including special apartments for the "BIPOC community"—violated the Fair Housing Act.
The county, which encompasses most of Portland, had previously agreed to remove questions about race and sexual orientation from a screening tool—first reported by the Washington Free Beacon—used to prioritize applicants for housing assistance. Wednesday's agreement covers a wider range of programs and requires the county to rescore pending applications for homeless services. It will also require all employees of the county's Homeless Services Department to complete four hours of fair housing training.
I wonder if, in light of the midterm results, Multnomah County (basically Portland) will rethink it's public revocation of their pledge to honor equal rights, rather than equity. I'm quite sure they never really intended to honor it.
For now, the fishing is good, with plenty of big stripers around to catch (and mostly, release). But a current of anxiety runs underneath the sport and the industry.
Captain Marco Lamothe, who runs Keeper Charters out of Saco, went on more than 100 fishing trips this year and caught plenty of larger, older striped bass, which can live to 30 years or more. But he worries about the fishery’s future because he’s not seeing as many smaller, younger fish. Of the hundreds of striped bass he caught this year, only one measured less than 28 inches.
That's bigger than the majority of the fish we catch here, where 22-25 inches seems to be the median size, at least where Pete has been fishing. But it makes sense that sea run fish are larger.
“The tourists were abundant, and the fish were cooperative, and we had a lot of really successful fishing trips,” Lamothe said. But, he added, “We’re just not seeing any small- to medium-sized fish. So it’s concerning.”
Zachary Whitener, a senior research associate at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and a former charter boat captain himself, put it more strongly. “It’s terrifying,” he said. “Once those big fish are gone, there’s nobody to refill the population.”
The factors behind this decline are complex, Whitener said. But one major factor is rainfall in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Some striped bass spawn in the Kennebec River watershed here in Maine, but most stripers are born in the Chesapeake and migrate up and down the East Coast each year.
For nearly a decade, there haven’t been very many young stripers.
The latest survey from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, released on Oct. 19, shows that striped bass recruitment was low for the eighth year in a row. Results from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science survey were better, showing average recruitment in the southern half of the bay this year. The scientists noted in their report, however, that “low recruitment in recent years remains a major concern.”
I don't know, but I've been told, that their is pretty decent crop of young stripers up in the northern end of the bay. Not the great masses we used to see all over but at least a smattering of undersized, but catchable fish. But I was a little concerned to see this:
Carrie Kennedy, acting associate director of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ fishing and boating services, said she wonders if fisheries managers like herself need to adjust their expectations for striped bass as their environment changes. Kennedy oversees Maryland’s fish monitoring efforts, including the juvenile striped bass survey. “The likelihood of making that 2029 rebuilding seems less and less likely every additional year we have low recruitment,” Kennedy said.
Striped bass isn’t the only sea-run fish — fish that spawn in freshwater but live as adults in the ocean — struggling with recruitment, Kennedy pointed out. White perch and yellow perch show similar trends over the same time period. “I think it’s a pretty good indicator that fishing isn’t the problem,” she said.
Instead, Kennedy pointed to the large-scale ecosystem shifts currently underway due to climate change and other factors, such as development on land that affects streams, rivers, estuaries and ultimately the ocean, too. “It’s not the same Chesapeake Bay. It’s not the same planet that we had 20 years ago when we had really great recruitment,” she said.
She may be right, and I've had the same thought about oysters, but I hate to MDDNR turning their back on the possibility of restoring healthy striper populations.
Counterintuitively, Is This the Best Outcome for the US and Israel? "The US will stop the payment of military aid to Israel. It will, however, continue authorizing the sale of key US weapons systems to its ally." Mark Tapscott at Insty on US AID TO ISRAEL: "Now that President Donald Trump has announced the end of U.S. military aide to Israel, all kinds of conjecture is blowing up on Social Media on the backstory. But Richard Pollock’s is one of the few sane voices and he provides the needed context that points to the continued strong relationship between the U.S. and Israel."
I have a little more in the old digital fridge, but I'm going to stop here today, and look around. So what's going to happen in the next couple of years? My predictions: Senate Democrats will quickly nuke the filibuster, and start to legislate their agenda; try to pack the Supreme Court (I still say Trump should try it quickly, just to get Dems on record it's a bad idea), make Washington and Puerto Rico states, open the borders, abolish ICE, and begin hearings into any Republican who sticks his head up. Only Trump's veto is in the way to stop them. Will Republicans fight to uphold it? They haven't been all that trustworthy in the past. Also, media companies and big tech will be ready to start censoring conservative voices again, and educational institutions will being to bring back DEI.
