WASHINGTON—In the midst of unprecedented buzz over the highly anticipated crop of summer strawberries, a report issued today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicated that there’s absolutely no way this year’s batch will come anywhere close to living up to all the hype. “For all the chatter that’s circulating around these summer strawberries—and there’s a lot—there’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell they end up meeting our wildly inflated expectations at this point,” said department spokesperson Marsha Rockwell, noting that people “must be fucking dreaming” if they’re actually buying into the rumors concerning the unparalleled sweetness, texture, and abundance of the fruit’s coming harvest. “Yeah, we’ve all heard about how these berries are totally going to knock our socks off, but you need to keep in mind we were saying the same thing leading up to the summer of ’07, and we all remember how that turned out. Hey, I know we all want another batch like we had in 1994, but trust me: It ain’t fucking happening. Not this year.” Rockwell added that if the U.S. populace doesn’t “get their heads out of the clouds and come back to reality,” the resulting letdown could be the biggest disappointment since the “total bullshit” crop of asparagus that absolutely ruined the spring of 2003.