"Steve Jobs' appearance will be key," wrote Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster before Apple's widely anticipated "Let's Rock" special event in San Francisco Tuesday.

Jobs' gaunt features and evident weight loss at his last public appearance – at Apple's annual World Wide Developers Conference in June – drove Apple's (AAPL) stock price down and set off speculation about what might be wrong with him. (link)

In 2004 Jobs had a cancerous tumor removed from his pancreas (see here). Earlier this year he had a second operation to deal with digestive problems stemming from that operation, according to the New York Times (link).

So how did he look today? You be the judge. The photo on the left is from June 9. The one on the right was taken Tuesday at the Let's Rock event.

For a blow-by-blow account of the event, see Jon Fortt's live blog here.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says Steve Jobs' physical appearance at Let's Rock — a widely-anticipated Apple special event scheduled for Tuesday at 1 p.m. EDT in San Francisco — will reassure investors and boost the company's share price.

In a note to clients Monday, Munster doesn't claim to have any inside information about the health of Apple's (AAPL) CEO, who had a cancerous tumor removed from his pancreas in 2004 (see "The trouble with Steve Jobs"). At his last public appearance in June (pictured right), Jobs looked surprisingly thin, setting off several rounds of speculation about what might have caused his weight loss (see here).

Rather, Munster's belief that Jobs' appearance Tuesday will be a "slight positive" for the stock is based on the assumption that Jobs would not be going on stage if he didn't feel — and perhaps more important, look — well enough to reassure investors.

"We are confident that Steve Jobs will be presenting and we anticipate his appearance at the event to be viewed as a positive," Munster wrote under the heading Steve Jobs' Appearance Will Be Key. Apple has not confirmed that Jobs will speak Tuesday, although the Apple chief typically makes the new product announcements at big media events like Let's Rock.

"While some investors are concerned that Jobs will not deliver the keynote," wrote Munster, "we have reason to believe he will. Therefore, we believe his health has improved since the June event, which would be a positive for the stock."

Munster goes on to outline his expectations for Tuesday's event: a redesigned iPod touch and a new iPod nano along with price cuts and capacity changes for the shuffle and classic.

One "unlikely wildcard," he adds, "could be updated AppleTV hardware features like live TV recording (DVR) or other digital living room accessories for the iTunes ecosystem (such as wireless speakers)."

For more speculation about Apple TV, see Tuning in to Apple TV 3.0

Joe Nocera buried his lead.

The New York Times columnist — and former Fortune editor — waited until the end of Saturday's 1,700-word "Talking Business" column about the health of Apple's CEO and the secrecy that surrounds it to reveal that on Thursday afternoon, several hours after he'd gotten his final “Steve’s health is a private matter” from Apple's public relations machine, he got a call from Steve Jobs himself.

“This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”

Jobs, according to Nocera, said he would share some details about the health condition that made him to look so thin and haggard at his last public appearace — and triggered two share-punishing rounds of speculation on Wall Street — if Nocera agreed to keep the conversation off the record.

Nocera agreed, and reported only that nothing Jobs told him …

"contradicted the reporting that [Times reporter] John Markoff and I did this week. While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than 'a common bug,' they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer."

The "common bug" is a reference to the explanation for Jobs' weight loss that Apple's PR department put out in June — an explanation that Nocera feels fell somewhat short of the truth. Markoff reported on Wednesday that Jobs had had an unnamed surgical procedure earlier this year related to his loss of weight, and Nocera adds that he had learned that Jobs was having ongoing digestive difficulties stemming from the cancer surgery he had four years ago — the details of which were first reported by Fortune (see here).

All this leads Nocera to the broader point he wants to make about Apple:

"Apple simply can’t be trusted to tell truth about its chief executive. Under Mr. Jobs, Apple has created a culture of secrecy that has served it well in many ways — the speculation over which products Apple will unveil at the annual MacWorld conference has been one of the company’s best marketing tools. But that same culture poisons its corporate governance. Apple tells analysts far less about its operations than most companies do. It turns low-level decisions into state secrets. Directors are often left out of the loop. And it dissembles with impunity." (link)

So, yes, Nocera thinks Steve Jobs is an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he's above the law.

But Jobs may have the last laugh. Twice in his column, Nocera refers to things that happened during Apple's (AAPL) third quarter conference call on Tuesday afternoon.

In fact, the conference call happened on Monday.

UPDATE: The error in the printed edition of the paper has been corrected in the online version.