* Dennis Berman: Meet my departed grandma, fledgling Facebook investor

* Vivek Wadhwa: Friends don’t let friends take education advice from Peter Thiel

* Morning Call: U.S. futures rise ahead of JP Morgan results, London opens strong on banks, European shares rebound and the Nikkei slips.

* Jed Rakoff: Are federal judges competent?

* Reuters: The U.S. and China have begun an M&A cold war

* Apollo Global Management (APO) gets itself into the broker-dealer biz

* Mark MacLeod: A checklist of what VCs are looking for in an elevator pitch

* Why not? League tables for PR firms repping M&A transactions (Abernathy is on top)

* Numbers not even a Winklevoss could love: Bleak financials from the MySpace pitchbook

* Painful: Charlie Christ cuts a video apologizing to David Byrne for using Talking Heads music in campaign ads

* J Crew boss Mickey Drexler discusses his actions leading up to the TPG/Leonard Green buyout: “I would do it the same way… I sleep well at night.”

* Worst week ever? Sequoia Capital’s Mark Kvamme is no longer Ohio’s head of economic development, following allegations that his appointment was illegal. Then he got injured in a motocross accident.