On the eve of its IPO announcement, some unsettling news for Facebook: Half of Americans think the social networking site is a passing fad. Fifty percent of those asked in the AP/CNBC poll also think Facebook has been overvalued. The New York Daily News says the skepticism increases with age and that young adults “are more willing to dance to their hoodie-wearing piper, 28-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg.”

GM says it is unhappy with the way its ads have performed on Facebook and has decided to stop advertising on the social networking site. GM, which the Wall Street Journal says is one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., couldn’t have chosen a worse time—Zuckerberg and company have spent the last few weeks trying to convince investors that its advertising business “makes it worthy of a sky-high valuation.”

The band String Cheese Incident is going through some incredible lengths to spare its fans from paying TicketMaster fees. Essentially, they’re scalping their own tickets. Recently, the band fronted $20,000 to a group of 50 fans and friends to buy tickets at LA’s Greek Theater, and then send the tickets to Colorado so they could be put up for sale on the band’s website.

Meet the meeting killers. The Wall Street Journal identifies personalities that do more than impede a meeting’s progress—they kill it. First, there’s the Jokester, who’s crime is “assault with a deadly punch line.” But Jokesters pale in comparison to the Quiet Plotter, who “practices passive-aggressive insubordination” by saying nothing during the meeting and then later undermines everything that was decided. The Journal also has some helpful tips for how to deal with each personality you encounter in the bored room.

Genentech has developed a new drug, which it hopes will stop Alzheimer’s before the disease has a chance to do any real damage says the San Francisco Chronicle. To test the treatment the pharmaceutical company has recruited a single family, a large Colombian clan of about 5,000 relatives, who have a gene mutation that all but assures they will get Alzeimer’s early in life, usually in their 40s.

Joan Rivers is playing a show in Florida this week. And ahead of the sold-out gig, the Sun Sentinel decided to crunch some numbers, namely to find out how much it would cost to look like Rivers. They stop calculating at her chest but estimate it took the 79-year-old comedienne about $26,000 to look the way she does.

The Faja is surging in popularity. It’s basically a girdle, used primarily for liposuction patients after they’ve had surgery. The New York Times says it’s especially popular with young Latinas, who used it as a short cut to an hourglass figure.  One woman says the appeal is simple:  her love handles disappear the second she put on her Faja.

Horses on a Train?  The Illinois Senate approved a measure yesterday to allow miniature horses to be used as service animals. The Chicago Sun-Times says the ruling means the tiny horses can now accompany people to stores and schools—basically anywhere a service dog can go.

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. And when life hands you tugboat wakes, go surfing. The Seattle Times says you don’t need waves to go surfing—or an ocean. Apparently, for a certain group of adventurers riding the wake of a tugboat in a sea kayak is equally as fun. Because the boats ride so deep, they produce decent waves—about six or seven feet tall. VIDEO

Cool picture in the New York Daily News this morning. It’s not a fish…it’s not a car…it’s an amphibious supercar! Called the sea lion, it’s the world’s fastest water-to-road vehicle, reaching 125mph on the road and up to 60 mph in water. And it can be yours—for a cool $259,500.

Move over Isabella, says the New York Daily News. Sophia is the top US girls name this year. Jacob nabbed the number one spot for boys. Number two was the Kardashian-inspired Mason. And there were some real celebrity names on the list too. After dropping out of the top 1000 names last year, Elvis is back on the list, at number 904.

Ladies, listen up: Minneapolis-St. Paul is the fourth best place for women to live in the US, says the Star Tribune. (New York, by the way, came in fifth.) Trumped only Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Boston, the Twin Cities got high marks for life expectancy and number of women who completed high school on the nation-wide survey of women’s well-being. Women in DC made the most money and women in San Francisco lived the longest.

The 2012 presidential campaign is shaping up to be an interesting one. The San Francisco Chronicle says Roseanne Barr—yes that Roseanne—is running as a Green Party candidate. At a party debate this weekend the actress said, “in deference to the Greens’ anti-death-penalty stance,” she’d ease up on jokes about “sending billionaires to the guillotine.”

“The Crown Vic is dead, long live the Crown Vic,” declares the LA Times this morning. In September, the last of the iconic cars rolled off the line but “like a cockroach…the Crown Vic is resilient.” The paper says the cars now have cultish appeal. Enthusiasts buy them at auction, usually for under $5000 and then soup them up. The enormous trunk is a plus—you can fit about six speakers in there.

The Washington Post says inventors are racing to build a better battery. Maybe the day will come when I’m not always searching for iPhone power at midday. Apparently, the problem hit home at the Consumer Electronic Show this year when “you couldn’t talk to anyone after 3 p.m. because their smartphone batteries had all died.” There has also been a boost of federal funding to create a better battery.

Several South Florida casinos are getting a new game that looks like roulette, sounds like roulette, and “may even smell like roulette,” says the Sun Sentinel—but don’t call it roulette. Roulette is illegal in the state so casino operators are installing a semi-automatic version with a random-number generator that determines the speed of the ball and the wheel, instead of leaving it up to the dealer, which, in the eyes of the law, makes it a slot machine.

Yet again, John Travolta is on the front page of the New York Daily News. The Gotti family says even with the gay sex allegations, it’s still OK with them if Travolta plays the John Gotti character in an upcoming movie. In an ” expletive-filled defense of the actor,” Victoria Gotti told the paper: “Who the f—k really cares? Does it make him less of a beautiful human being? No. . . .”

Floridians are puzzling over a mystery that arrived from the sea yesterday after a “55-gallon drum that fizzed, smoked, hissed, partially exploded” washed up on shore. The Sun Sentinel says the bomb squad was called in but was just as confused as everyone else. They finally settled on a high-tech solution—pouring baking soda on it to neutralize any acids—which caused a minor explosion.

Should you clean a cut with hydrogen peroxide or alcohol—or neither?  The Wall Street Journal has a medicine cabinet quiz in today’s paper, testing your knowledge on the treatment options you have at home. The answer, by the way, is neither. Apparently, cold water is the way to go for cleaning a cut.

Interesting story in the San Jose Mercury News about a new strategy by Berkeley researchers. They’re using preschoolers to find out ways to make a better, smarter computer, looking for things like how kids learn languages and how they discover what people are thinking and feeling—two things computers aren’t so good at. They hope to vault some of the tradition stumbling blocks of artificial intelligence by mimicking the behavior of children.

Women who want to have children at some point but aren’t ready yet are increasingly having their eggs frozen. And the New York Times says it’s “would-be grandparents” that often foot the bill. As a fertility doctor who noted the trend says: “I see these patients come in, and they’re with two elderly people, and I’m like, ‘What the hey?’ ”

The Sun Sentinel says seniors are worrying about their student loans. But it’s not just those still in college, it’s the gray hair variety too. There are about two million people, who are at least 60 years old and still paying off their college loans, says the paper. That’s about five percent of the 37 million Americans who have a college loan. 

Scott Thompson is the second CEO to step down at Yahoo in less than a year, reports the Wall Street Journal this morning. Thompson was embroiled in a scandal after it was discovered that his resume erroneously claimed he had a degree in computer science. The Journal says before he left over the weekend, Thompson disclosed to Yahoo’s board that he’s been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

The Washington Post reports this morning that Iran is turning off the GPS beacons on its tanker ships in an effort to cloak sales that defy international sanctions. Apparently, it’s been increasingly hard for the country to sell its petroleum supply, so they’ve experimenting with this new technique, which violates maritime law.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, what is the most popular Girl Scout cookie of them all? USA Today has a breakdown of cookie sales on its front page this morning. I would’ve thought “Thin Mints” were the runaway #1. They are #1—but only narrowly. According to the paper’s data, 25 percent of all cookies sold were Thin Mints. In second place are carmely Somoas with 19 percent and in third, with 13 percent of sales, peanut butter patties.

Anyone who knows me, knows my love of Slurpees is well documented. 7-11 says it will roll out a new, Splenda-sweetened drink called “Slurpee Lite” this summer. Marketers say its a bid to try and cash in on the skinny trend sweeping the nation and will target women in their 20s. I will also be giving it a try.