OK, let me just say for the record that I realize now that “Big Bang, Little Girl” is by far the worst and most disturbing blog post title ever. It only occurred to me after I’d hit “publish:” Shit, thought I. That doesn’t sound like a post about space at all. It sounds like the name of a webpage my teenaged-boy-babysitter in Nova Scotia might have found awfully appealing.

Ugh. I blame it on my iPad Mini. Trying to blog from it is like trying to give a massage with oven mitts on. Impossible. Useless. Unspeakably frustrating for all concerned. Add to the that the time constraint of trying to post during my lunch hour and you get exactly the kind of ill-conceived, uncomfortable-making prose mentioned above. I apologize. I have recommenced lugging my laptop to work. It may be six years old. It may weight three kilos. But it doesn’t make writing so labor-intensive that my brain stalls out.

I also apologize for saying–somewhat smugly, I now realize–that I intended to teach MJ everything I learned in the “Big Bang.” It was an ambitious statement, made when I was only 40 pages into the book. Now that I’m knee-deep in Einstein’s theory of special relativity I have rethought my position. I aim to teach her everything–provided that a) I understand it myself, and b) it requires no discussion of alternate dimensions. Since this effectively rules out everything from page 41 or so on, we will officially be concluding our little talks. On that subject, at least.

Now, if she wants to talk about the relative merits of iPads versus laptops? I have a lot to say.