Recently I was given just 24 hours to explore a first production build of the Apple iTablet — and here are my first impressions and discoveries. First, it’s more like an iPhone than a MacBook. The operating system depends on gestures, and expands the vocabulary. Your hand is going to be dancing.

Second big news: it’s not just an application platform and full-color reader and media player. It’s also a dual camera and, yes, read this twice, a phone. And therein lies a tale. For those whose habits have been formed around their iPhones, be very, very careful when your iTablet rings for the first time. That urge to whip the thing with its ginormous 10 inch screen up to your ear is going to play havoc with your eye. In the small group of folks I ran into who were returning their demo versions, most of us had nasty shiners.

Apple assures us that final production versions will come with training corners — foam wedgies that will soften the blow until the user gets used to answering the giant device. And the second mod will be a catcher’s mitt-like webbing on the back of the iTablet so you can one hand it.

Killer apps? Try this — for those who will want to mount the iTablet high on their dashboard, this thing is going to block your view. So Apple has come up with the brilliant iDrive. The camera on the back side stays live and you basically can see right through your iTablet, like a virtual window. A second camera, imbedded invisibly in the screen, can provide help in backing up.

When you’re not in your car, the embedded cameras creates iMirror, and one of the coolest apps we’ve seen so far is iTrim. Male or female, select your hairstyle from dozens of possibilities, and then iTrim gives you cut by cut directions so you can do it yourself. You might need a little help for the back and top, or you can sync up two iTablets and put them on the Infinite Barbershop Mirror setting.

Now with all that extra screen area to dance your hand on, Apple has greatly expanded the gestures it understands. First, there’s the Full Palm Down. Just spread out your hand and plant it on the screen. Whatever program that’s currently running will screech to a halt. Flip your hand over and give it the Brush Off, and the program will go away. Do it several times and the screen will clear. Then there’s the Fist Bump. Closed fist means ‘Yes.’ Or Agree, or Continue, Install, or ‘Can I have some more, please?’

Finally, all of publishing has been praying that the iTablet will be a Kindle killer and free the publishing world from the threat of world domination by Amazon. Success may depend on whether people will want the reading part of their life to be as easily interrupted as everything else in their world. When your book can hurl e-mails at you, ring your phone, cut your hair and even show you who’s sneaking up behind you, some may not find that to be the ideal reading environment.

Then there’s the concern about the infantilism that permeates Steve Job’s attitude toward culture. “People don’t read anymore,” is one of his brilliant observations. On iTunes, all music has become a “song.” Verdi’s Requiem Mass is downloadable as a bunch of songs. For an entire generation, a Beethoven symphony is now four songs. This is surely a crime against humanity of some sort.

So take the same attitude and apply it to books. And guess what? You aren’t going to be buying a ‘book’ on the iTunes store. You’re going to be buying a ’story’ one chapter at a time, whether it’s Wind in the Willows or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, everything is going to be just a chapter in a story.

The good news is the color is great. You can zoom in for spectacular detail. And when you check in to that “mirror” function you’ll be able to track the progress of your shiner.

I had abandoned my plans to buy Sarah Palin’s autobiography. You know how it is — you hear about what is likely to be a great book and you get all ready to read it, but you don’t quite pay attention to what day it’s going to come out, and then all those critics get an early copy and before long everybody is already telling you about all the great stuff that’s in the book and if you don’t put your fingers in your ears and go la la la it’s all spoiled.

Sometimes I wish everyone could just keep it to themselves for a week and give the rest of us a chance to experience something like this without having others make up our minds for us. But then, the author Herself went on tour and suddenly she was everywhere talking about her book and answering questions. So here we are a week or so later, and I just can’t imagine anything older than Going Rogue.

So even though I’d taken it off my must have list, I was in a Costco over the weekend and there was a pile of several hundred of her books, all red and exciting on the end of a huge table. I have to admit, Frank Rich’s insights notwithstanding, I was still drawn to pick one up. Maybe there was something about Ms. Palin that everyone had missed. Maybe the secret of her attraction would finally, suddenly, become dazzlingly clear to me.

I picked up a copy of the book and fanned it open to read a sample. Surely this was going to be as close as Sarah Palin and I were ever going to get in this life, so no question there was a little frisson in the air. I’m not kidding. Right there in the middle of Costco. Powerful something going on.

I looked at the page. I don’t remember now exactly which one, but I was immediately struck by something peculiar. It just didn’t look like a normal page in a book. Was it the typography? There were all these little verticals dancing all over the place. What the heck was going on? Was it the weird Costco lighting? Was I becoming dyslexic? Oh dog, please tell me it wasn’t happening!

But then I saw what it was. The page was full of a great many freestanding uppercase ‘I’s. It was the most I have ever seen on a page. Fortunately, my wife has a peculiar genius for pattern recognition. I got her attention by showing her what I was reading. She gave me a look that said, “Are you okay?” But she came over and peered at the page I was pointing to. “See anything strange here?” In less than two seconds she saw it too. “‘I’s all over the place. I’ve never seen so many.”

We counted them. Twenty-seven ‘I’s on a single page. Just for a reality check, I searched around for a comparable autobiography, and Ted Kennedy’s True Compass fell conveniently to hand. We opened to a random page and counted the ‘I’s. Four. We tried another page. Twelve. Clearly the man cared too little about his subject. An ego piker, no question.

I felt Palin deserved an award of some kind for her achievement. I’ll bet Sigmund Freud’s best pals didn’t run around Vienna calling him Siggy. Just didn’t have the right sound. I’ll bet they called him Ziggy. And that’s the perfect name for the Best Achievement in Ego for 2009. Sarah Palin, your Ziggy is in the mail. Bigger than an Oscar and much, much brighter.

Fortunately, I turned to another page and found a little morsel from Sarah that was fresh for me, and I’d like to share it. She seems obsessed with killing and eating animals, and she’s been oft quoted to the effect that she has a place for all of Alaska’s endangered species. That’d be on her plate, right next to the mashed potatoes. Hilarious. But I found an even better quote from her: “If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?” Sounds like something out of Jeffrey Dahmer’s playbook, actually. And if you’re Sarah’s dog or cat or chubby little baby, downright terrifying.

Search and advertising giant Google and Ohio Art, maker of the children’s classic drawing toy announced a joint venture today to produce the first e-book reader for pre-schoolers. Named the Etch a Book, the new reader will capitalize on the highly refined Etch a Sketch two knob interface which is already familiar to millions of parents and children all over the globe.

In making the announcement, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, revealed that Google has been scanning children’s literature of all kinds for several years now, accumulating a library of more than 2,000,000 children’s titles, many of which have been out of print for decades.

One of the big challenges in developing the Etch a Book has been the fact that young children don’t yet read. “The answer we found was to read the books to the children,” says Brin. The Etch will offer several voices, including those described as ‘friendly mom’ and ‘funny dad.’

Since the Etch a Book screen is closely derived from the classic Etch a Sketch, the reader will not be able to display text or pictures. “This was a big challenge for the books that are all illustration and no text,” says Larry Killgallon, CEO of Ohio Art. “We wanted to keep the child involved and the screen interactive, as with all our products.” The answer is to have the friendly mom reader or the funny dad reader describe the art that Google has scanned. For Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel — “There’s a big steam tractor digging a hole,” says the voice. In presenting what had been a cloth book, The Big Farm, in the demonstration we saw, the ‘friendly mom’ is heard to say, “And here’s a big white sheep.”

To complete the reading experience for the very young, the Etch a Book comes with an available Bouncy Lap, which vibrates the child up and down gently while the child is being read to by the Etch a Book. Also available is a ventilator, which simulates the soft breath of a reading parent on the child’s cheek. Available Christmas.

When my youngest, Max, was 8, he could run off a string of complicated jokes like an old pro in the Catskills. Really, he could have become a regular on the Tonight Show. That good.

We loved to talk about what was funny. I asked him what a really, really great joke would do.

“People would laugh until they cried.”

Exactly. It was then that I came up with an idea that almost drove Max crazy. That wasn’t the purpose, of course, but that’s the way it worked out for awhile. I told Max there was such a thing as The Perfect Joke. It was so funny people would not be able to stop laughing, and therefor they would die. The perfect joke, in the wrong hands, could wipe out the planet.

And the thing was — I knew The Joke. But, of course, I couldn’t tell it to him because I loved him.

“I can take it. I promise I’ll be able to stop laughing.”

I explained that even if he could achieve that, which I seriously doubted, it would be too great a burden to put on him to give him that kind of power. If someone made him angry, he would be sorely tempted to tell The Joke. We went around on this for a few weeks until he reluctantly came to the realization that I, in fact, didn’t know the perfect joke. Sure, if you sensed he might have been a little relieved, you’d be right. But on another level, he was profoundly disappointed.

Which brings me to blogging. For anyone who writes regularly in the strange medium of the Web, you never know to what strange corners of the earth your thoughts are travelling, who is reading you, who gets what you’re trying to say, who hears you above the din. Except there’s a little feedback here and there when other websites pick you up, or someone makes a comment, or when you’re talking with someone about a completely isolated topic and out of the blue they mention they read something you wrote.

So what if someone writes the perfect blog post someday? What would happen if I, for instance, were to write a blog that was so edgy, so interesting, so stimulating, that the first person who stumbled across it was compelled to immediately retweet it to their 73 followers? And what if every single one of them also wanted to share it with everyone they knew? Would it be as dangerous as the perfect joke, with the potential to destroy the planet?

Could the Web take the stress? One, two, three billion repeats of the same post, rolling out in just a few days time. At first there might be attacks of server reflux. Sitting there in their black little racks, lights blinking away, a server might tremble, bravely attempt to catch up with the traffic, and then just be overwhelmed. Click! The server takes itself offline. At first it happens in isolated locations, but then before long there would be cascading failures at some of the massive solar-powered Google farms. (There would be a heightened danger if the really excellent blog was roaring through a Google farm in southern Oregon on a cloudy day, for instance.)

Then, servers all over the globe would switch in to pick up the load, and soon they, too, would be quickly overwhelmed as the charming, almost innocent little blog post was translated into more and more languages and dialects and its infectious blend of comedy, imagination, and piquancy turned out to work in virtually all cultures and all languages. It was not just a good little post, but verging on the perfect.

And even when the servers of entire nations collapsed in paroxysms of server reflux, brave individuals, unable to control their desire to share the post, would be compelled to copy it by hand, mount their camels, and race it across borders, driven to share their discovery.

Fortunately for me and Max and the world, I never came up with the perfect joke, and Max was spared that terrible burden. I have noticed, though, that a heavy overcast is forecast for southern Oregon this week. Probably nothing to worry about.

A few weeks ago I posted an open letter to GM CEO Fritz Henderson on the first day of GM’s entering into bankruptcy protection, offering my concern that Mr. Henderson’s reliance on great GM design to save the company might be a problem since GM had put so much ugly tin on America’s roads. I also noted that GM’s culture needed to change, and this was their last chance to get it right. I didn’t mention that most experts on corporate change say it requires 3 — 5 years to accomplish, if you know what you’re doing.

In an amazing display of exactly what I was talking about, Mr. Henderson tossed my article over the fence and assigned the response to Global VP for all design, Ed Welburn, who wrote a public letter back to “Gerald Sindell of the Huffington Post,” which contained an impassioned defense of GM design, and the thousands of artists and modelers at work around the clock around the world creating beautiful new GM cars. Mr. Welburn invited me to visit GM dealerships, look at and drive the new Chevys, Buicks and Cadillacs. I was also invited to visit to global design headquarters in Detroit and see for myself.

I went to the GM website which lists a number of dealers nearby in San Francisco and Marin County, but when I tried to call them I was shocked to discover that their phones were disconnected. I eventually found some GM dealers who were answering their phones and asked to see if they had the cars Ed had suggested I look at. Although half the models had not yet arrived, I did eventually spend two days visiting three GM dealerships, made many notes, talked to a lot of salespeople, and drove some cars. I sent an email to Mr. Welburn asking if he would like my private thoughts, and upon his acceptance, I wrote him an 8 page letter about what I had seen in the field and made some suggestions about how the consumer experience might be improved. I asked him to please let me know if he had received my email.

But I received no answer. None.

I wrote again, asking for Mr. Welburn to confirm whether or not he had received my letter. And I wrote a third time this week. Again, silence.

So, what the heck. I might as well share some of my thoughts about GM publicly.

I think it would be a good idea for GM to make a grand gesture, as a way of saying we’re sorry, we get it, we are a different kind of company now. We know we’re never going to be as cool as Apple, but we’re going to prove to you we’re not your bankruptcy lawyer’s old GM.

And as part of our sincere effort to undo some of the design atrocities of the past, we’re going to remove some of the eyesores that have made America’s highways home to most of the ugliest cars the world has ever seen. That’s right: GM is going to send our tow trucks out there all across America and buy back a few ugly cars and send them to the recycler. And we’re going to start with the Pontiac Aztek. Why single out the Aztek? Because in Mr. Welburn’s letter to me he singled out the Aztek as one of GM’s “misstep”s.

So there you have it. I’m offering it for free: my brilliant idea for GM to salvage its reputation, demonstrate imagination and commitment, make good on mistakes in the past, all in one daring move. Now don’t jump on the phone and call GM. If you are an Aztek’s owner, your days of humiliation are over. Just take that eyesore out of your garage, park it in front of your house, and wait for that GM towtruck to come to your neighborhood. It’s coming soon, I promise.

Over the course of almost this entire decade that will end in 2010, while I’ve been working with clients on their books, on other innovation projects, and on my own work, there has been one completely bizarre constant, often literally at my feet. Many conferences in my office have been momentarily interrupted when someone looked down and noticed that under my desk, not far from my shoes, rested a large and very real jackrabbit. She was not really a pet in those years. She had been injured, I had rescued her, and she decided to stay. We weren’t friends, it was simply that she decided we were less likely to eat her than many of the predators that lurked just beyond our sliding glass doors. Here’s a little piece I wrote to celebrate Rascal’s eighth anniversary sharing the same roof.

I’m trying to read the morning Times, but I can feel her eyes on the back of my neck. My wife, Leanne, is reading the paper, too. “Someone wants you to pick her up.” The someone is not our German Shorthaired Pointer, Tesla, who is pointing the last morsel of bagel at the moment.

I look back over my shoulder to meet her gaze, knowing her head will be crammed up against her wiry cage. She stares at me with her miniature camel eyes. “I love you too, Rascal.” I get up and reach through the hole that I cut eight years ago in the top of her cage, and gently pull her away from the door. I swing up the little door, cradle her in both my hands, and draw her out of the cage, as I have done thousands of times. I hold her close to me, and she, being right-footed, places her right paw on the side of my chin in gentle greeting.

Rascal is a hare, a true wild jackrabbit with tall stiff ears and impossibly long back legs. Eight years ago today my youngest son Max breezed past my office with the news that “Tesla may have killed a rabbit,” up on the mountain top at the end of our street, Ridge Road in Tiburon, California. I am by nature a rescuer, can’t be helped. “Are you sure it’s dead?” Tesla wasn’t the kind of dog that would harm a rabbit. Max thought the rabbit, at very least, was severely injured. I grabbed a blanket and we went hunting for the shrub were the rabbit was last seen. Within a few moments, a scrawny rabbit came tearing out of the bushes, sort of running sideways, and stopped, resting on its side. I approached carefully and swooped the blanket over it. When I gingerly peeled the blanket back, I found myself being evaluated by a surprisingly calm little being. “Well look at you!” I gathered her up and Max held her as we drove to our favorite pet shop in Mill Valley. The brothers who owned the place fawned over the rabbit and were full of advice. We left with a cage, food, and a flea collar.

Dr. Debra Scheenstra specializes in wild animals and makes house-calls. She listened to her patient’s heart and peered into her ears and mouth. The rabbit wasn’t injured — she had an inner ear infection which made it hard for her to stand up. Could she be nursed back to health and returned to the wild? The doctor said it was unlikely. But the infection could be treated. I received instruction on giving injections to a jackrabbit (lift a fold on her back, don’t stick yourself) and thirty syringes.

I decided it was okay to bond with the little creature, so I named her Rascal. The doctor has said she was a young adult female, probably a year old. Few jackrabbits survived in human care. Life expectancy in the wild was five years. In my eclectic library I dug out an old reference book on care for wild animals by the zookeeper of the London Zoo. The paragraph on hares was brief and to the point. Jackrabbits don’t survive out of the wild and they hate the smell of human hair. I lowered my expectations.

Rascal soon regained her balance and responded to my experiments at rehab. Before long she had free reign of my office, and had housebroken herself to her cage. We offered her occasional opportunities to roam the rest of our house and she soon found her preferred spot under our piano. She stayed away from open doors, going outside on her own only twice. For the next several years she kept her distance from people, adoring only Tesla, who ignored her. And then, five years ago, we had moved to Napa and my office was now right off the kitchen. Rascal’s cage was next to me, and she was now part of the family at all meals. She suddenly became affectionate, relaxing in my arms, licking whatever part of me was close to her. This morning her preferred spot is my nose, and remembering how she once, accidentally, bit through Leanne’s fingernail, letting her lick my nose takes courage.

I cradle her, with her long ears draped over my left arm, and her long legs stretched out over my right arm. I stroke her tummy for a moment, and then return to the paper. Whenever I turn the page, she fidgets, wanting me to look at her. I do, and she smiles. I swear it.