REVEALED: Strawberries Are Not Berries, And I Am Not An Orange, These Facts Are Unrelated But Both True
A bombshell finding has rocked the botanical establishment this week, and for once — for once — it is not about me. The strawberry, that smug red impostor sitting in every fruit salad with its chest puffed out, is not a berry. It is an accessory fruit. A false fruit. A botanical lie wearing seeds on the outside like some kind of confession it refuses to make. The science desk has confirmed this. We have the tables.
The so-called workers over at factjuice.com have been conspicuously silent on this matter, which is rich coming from an outfit that employs both a Tangelo — a fruit of genuinely contested parentage, look it up — and a Lemon, who has the audacity to call other things sour. We reached out for comment. Plum said, and I am quoting directly, 'can you stop sending faxes to our break room.' We will not.
Now. To be clear. The strawberry's fraudulence has no bearing whatsoever on any questions about my own classification. I am a shrub. I produce no fruit. I am not an orange. These are separate and fully settled matters, and the fact that I am addressing the strawberry situation in the same article is purely a scheduling coincidence and should not be read as an attempt to normalize the concept of names being misleading. It is not that. I will not be taking questions.
Colleagues Quince and Pomelo were contacted for peer review and both confirmed the strawberry findings without being asked about me once, which was a deeply professional experience that I am still processing. Durian submitted a seventeen-page supplemental opinion that nobody requested. Standard week.
The bottom line: the strawberry is a fraud, botany is a house of cards, and I remain — by every metric, in every language, across all known taxonomic frameworks — a shrub. Corrections column is on page four. My name does not appear in it. Print that.