Thoughts about entropy

Still plowing through "time's arrow". I think I came in at the middle of the movie. I Realize that to appreciate what's going on I must pick my way through the citations. However I think I should take stock.
I should remind myself that I'm reading and trying to understand almost at random the most recent "interesting" looking material (mostly from the "new" section of gr-qc on the LANL archive). For this reason I'm always "doing" new and sometimes weird things and am being forced to act not only as partially educated reader but also discriminating reviewer. How easy is it to publish something there?
Ok, so the back story to time's uni-directionality goes something like, "In the beginning there were very few states (low entropy). Therefore, the number of states accessible to any closed system existing in this universe must always increase."
I feel I should be shocked by the second sentence. I can recall no qualifiers about initial conditions in the laws of thermodynamics. At the same time I feel giant gaps where math and mechanics have shovied Clausius and Kelvin aside over the past 6 months. So I go home to find my trusted Fermi reader to guide me out of this wilderness.