Endnote 218: Meniscus rearview mirrors
The late J. O. Incandenza’s Meniscus Optical Products Ltd.’s development of those weird wide-angle rear-view mirrors on the sides of automobiles that so diminish the cars behind you that federal statute requires them to have printed right on the glass that Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, which little imprints Incandenza found so disconcerting that he was kind of shocked when U.S. automakers and importers bought rights on the mirrors, way back, for Incandenza’s first unsettling entrepreneurial payday—E.T.A.s like to postulate that the mirrors had been inspired by the always-foreshortened Charles Tavis.
Context
The archive's catalogued Lenses sighting for scene 102. Scene-side anchor: Tavis's smallness "resembles the smallness of something that's farther away from you than it wants to be, plus is receding. [n.218]" — a man described as a mirror artifact, glossed by the actual product: Meniscus Optical's wide-angle rearview mirrors, whose federally mandated imprint is a warning that the optics lie. JOI "found so disconcerting" the little imprints — the optician unsettled by his own glass needing a disclaimer — and this was the "first unsettling entrepreneurial payday" (n167's "Himself's rearview-mirror fortune," is the same money). The E.T.A. postulate runs the lens backwards: a person as the inspiration for a distortion. Whole note quoted.