It's the season of change, the season of grand openings, the season of new books and quality food and good fortune. And it's been a long time since we've had a bizarre, contentious contest in this column. Without further ado: The first person who can identify the origins and explain the logic of the following passage wins a $50 gift certificate to Bailey/Coy Books:

The white Ford pickup rolled quietly to a stop below Tower Number Seven, one of ten large cylindrical structures at Abqaiq that are used to remove sulfur from petroleum, or turn it from "sour" to "sweet," in oil-patch jargon. Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't. Knowledge about health benefits of various foods has exploded during the past few decades. Like many of us, I think, my father spent the measure of his life piecing together a story he would never understand. "A kind of madness" is how a friend of mine, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, described the courage displayed by men whose battlefield heroics had earned them the Medal of Honor. You might want to rope up for this. This is a history of the Gulag: a history of the vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, from the islands of the White Sea to the shores of the Black Sea, from the Arctic Circle to the plains of central Asia, from Murmask to Vorkuta to Kazakhstan, from central Moscow to the Leningrad suburbs. In my view, being a liberal is something to be proud of. Getting consistently successful results from a recipe begins with measuring the ingredients correctly. The best U.S. Open performance of all time was by Tiger Woods at Pebble Peach in 2000. As recently as the mid-1970s, shopping for salmon in a West Coast fish market was fairly simple. In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. Whoa, Sam, you could lose a hand doing that! It was early on a warm summer's evening in the 1970s, as I stood in a palm plantation high on a green hillside in western Java, that I saw for the first time, silhouetted against the faint blue hills of faraway Sumatra, the small gathering of islands that is all that remains of what was once a mountain called Krakatoa. Like the moon, she shows us the same face each time we see her.

Send answers to frizzelle@thestranger.com. Good luck!

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PS: The Stranger is looking for a books intern. The internship is unpaid and requires a three-month commitment, though it is not without its rewards. To apply, send a letter, a resumé, and two writing samples to frizzelle@thestranger.com.