Joan Rivers Update: Daughter Melissa Asks for Prayers as Fellow Celebs Send Well Wishes

With Joan Rivers in a medically induced coma in what daughter Melissa has characterized as a "serious" condition, fellow celebrities and fans alike are sending their best wishes to the red carpet queen. Melissa, who has been keeping vigil at her ailing mom's side, released a new statement Friday to The Insider With Yahoo: "Her condition remains serious but she is receiving the best treatment and care possible." [Related: Joan Rivers Stable After She Stops Breathing] The comedy icon stopped breathing during what was supposed to be a minor throat procedure at a New York clinic. She was rushed to Mt. Sinai hospital in Manhattan in critical condition. Doctors placed her in a coma to stabilize her and plan to reevaluate her condition over the weekend, according to sources close to the family. "My mother would be so touched by the tributes and prayers that we have received from around the world," Melissa added. "We ask that you continue to keep her in your thoughts as we pray for her recovery."

Melissa, who rushed from Los Angeles with son Cooper when she received news of her mother's emergency Thursday morning, previously told Yahoo that Joan "was resting comfortably and is with our family."

As Melissa noted, thoughts and prayers are pouring in, both via deliveries to the hospital and on social media.


As Rosie O'Donnell put it: "Hey, Joan, this show ain't over -- get well now!"

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9 New Fat Facts That’ll Boost Your Weight Loss Efforts

Finally! An end to the back and forth about body fat

One minute, you’re drenching everything you eat in olive oil, the next you’re filling your pantry with nothing but “fat-free” goodies. Figuring out fat is beyond confusing…and annoying. The great news: these 9 new fat facts are all you need to know about choosing the right fats and navigating around the sketchy ones.

Related: 4 Types of Body Fat—Explained

1. Limiting your fat intake is totally passé.
After a number of studies confirmed the heart-healthy benefits of a Mediterranean diet—which includes several sources of unsaturated fats—top academics are calling for change to the USDA recommendation to limit daily calories from fat. “The amount of total fat is irrelevant, and we shouldn’t be using any numerical rule,” says Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health. “But the type of fat is still relevant.” Aim to get the majority of your fats from whole foods such as nuts, fish, avocado, high-fiber grains, and olive oil, à la the Mediterranean diet (rather than 100-calorie snack packs).

2. There are worse things than saturated fat.
Namely, refined carbs and sugar (see this infographic of what sugar does to your body for proof). While you may want to limit certain saturated fats, it’s no better to replace them with refined starch or sugar—for example, dropping butter in favor of jelly on your toast. It is helpful, on the other hand, to cut saturated fat if you replace it with unsaturated fat—for example, swapping butter with almond or peanut butter.

3. There is one type of fat you should never eat.
While saturated fat in moderate amounts is part of many healthy foods, such as olive oil and fish, trans fats should be avoided completely, Willett says. These artificial fats have no nutritional value and have been shown to raise “bad” LDL cholesterol and lower “good” HDL cholesterol, as well as increase risks of heart disease and diabetes. Learn more about good fats and bad fats, here.

4. The best way to cut cravings is to crowd them out.
A Mediterranean-style diet rich in whole foods, especially vegetables, olive oil, nuts, seeds, fish, and whole grains, and low in processed foods, meats, and dairy, will cut your cravings for the bad stuff—saturated fat, refined starches, and sugar.

5. You can tell if you have dangerous visceral fat in 30 seconds.
Okay, if you want to know for sure, you’ll have to have an abdominal MRI, which can cost several hundred dollars. The next best thing: This quick test, courtesy of Pamela Peeke, professor of medicine at the University of Maryland and author of Fight Fat After 40:

Lie flat on the floor and press your index fingers right above one side of your pelvic bone.
As you push down, tighten up your abdominal muscles.
Walk your index fingers across your abdominal muscle wall to your belly button: “it should feel nice and flat, like a stretched out piece of plastic,” says Peeke. If it sticks up, you’ve got visceral fat, which is pushing your ab muscles up.
Related: 9 Ways to Lose Stubborn Belly Fat

6. It’s the size of your fat cells that matters.
White fat produces a hormone called adiponectin, which helps regulate insulin production. Thin people have small fat cells, which release more insulin-regulating adiponectin than the large fat cells that heavier people have. This is one of the reasons why being overweight can be bad for health. “When you gain weight and fat cells increase in size, they produce less adiponectin, which in turn raises risk of conditions like diabetes and heart disease,” explains Louis Aronne, MD, director of the Obesity Clinic at Cornell.

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Maine floating cabin is 240 square feet of summer heaven

Can you imagine a more perfect little escape to dream about in the waning days of summer?

We can't. When we received an email from Maine Home+Design magazine about this charming floating cabin, dubbed Chateau Bathtub and the Redneck Yacht Club by its owners, we jumped at the chance to share it. (Click here or on a photo for a slideshow.)

Handmade by Foy Brown and his wife, Louisa, the 240-square-foot cottage was the fruit of a decade of work, just barely ready for their wedding night in 2010, writes Denise Dowling in the magazine. His family's business, J.O. Brown & Sons Shipyard, has been designing and building wooden boats for five generations.

Foy and Louisa Brown originally intended to rent it out for extra income, but -- sigh -- decided it was too good to share. "We realized that if you rent it to someone who gets snot-flying drunk, you're screwed no matter how much insurance you have," Foy Brown told the magazine. Now they live in it seasonally, tying it between North Haven piers for the winter.
And to see another fantastically unconventional home, a converted 1959 short bus, visit the Maine Home+Design website:

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A modern-day Dust Bowl

As a drought unfolds slowly and devastatingly, California farmers feel desperate and abandoned
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — Bob Taylor was barely 2 years old when his parents packed as many belongings as they could into their rickety old car and headed west from New Mexico toward California.

It was 1936, the height of the Dust Bowl, when the worst drought the country had ever seen forced tens of thousands of families to abandon their parched farmlands and head west in the hope of finding jobs and a more stable life.

Taylor’s parents were farm laborers, cotton pickers from Oklahoma and Texas who had slowly inched their way west chasing the crops that had somehow managed to survive the lack of rain. But then came the terrible dust storms, choking black blizzards of dirt fueled by the loose soil of eroded farmlands that swept across the plains, turning the days as dark as night. They were monsters that suffocated the life out of anything the drought hadn’t managed to kill — crops, animals and even people, who began to die from the dust that filled their lungs.

Taylor was too young to remember how bad it was. But he grew up hearing the stories from his parents, of how the land that had once been so rich and lush and healthy had slowly turned cracked and brittle and unwelcoming of life. How a drought that initially seemed like nothing more than a passing dry spell gradually unfolded into a disaster that destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people and deeply scarred the land in ways that never really healed.

“The time was hard,” Taylor said. “People were tough, my parents were tough… But the drought didn’t let up. It had no mercy at all on anything or anyone.”
The terrible struggle of Dust Bowl refugees was later immortalized by John Steinbeck, who based “The Grapes of Wrath” on the experiences of people like Taylor’s parents. Photographers like Dorothea Lange documented the heartbreaking plight of migrant farm families, as they escaped the drought only to suffer extreme poverty and discrimination as they tried to rebuild their lives out west.

But the most important testimony of that era may rest with Taylor and other children of the Dust Bowl, the last generation of Americans who understand in a way many never will the quiet danger of a sustained drought and how devastating it can be to the land, its industry and people.

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