Q: Mr. Federal Way, are city officials doing enough after all the murders hit us?

A: There’s this famous thought experiment, Shroedinger’s Cat. It’s a metaphor, and it basically says that if you trap a cat in a steel box with a vial of poison gas that’s set to open after an unknown amount of radioactive decay occurs, the cat is both alive and dead until you open the box and find out for sure.

Mr. Federal Way thinks the cat metaphor originally had something to do with electrons and the piano-playing kid from “Peanuts,” but he also thinks it’s a pretty apt metaphor for what the leaders of our fair city have been up to in the aftermath of the monumental downer of last week. Their steel box of ideas has cat-and-poison-levels of weird and unrelated things in it. Until we open the box, then it amazingly contains somethings that, simultaneously, are absolute nothings. It sure seemed like they were putting actual somethings in there, and maybe they did, but the odds are about even that they were actually nothings.

Quantum physics, electrons, metaphors, and “Peanuts” are all obviously above Mr. Federal Way’s pay grade. Still, the box is closed, and until we open it up and know for sure, the official responses to this point have all the appearances of a response while having none of the results. It’s a quantum quandary.

Councilman Martin Moore frequently exemplifies this incredible duality, and he did so again last week. At the emergency council meeting last Thursday, called for reasons unclear and toward results uncertain, Federal Way Police Chief Andy Hwang said, very clearly and with the confidence of someone who has access to honest-to-goodness evidence and a wealth of investigative experience, that one of the three murders had something to do with drugs. That means, one shouldn’t have to say, that two of them didn’t. That’s the majority. Most had nothing to do with drugs.

Moore’s diagnosis of the problem that night, courageously uttered in the face of contradictory testimony delivered mere minutes before, was, “I am convinced that part of the root causes are drugs. That is it. Amongst others. And I’m interested to find out… how do we become effective partners, I should say, in fighting the War on Drugs. Because I think that really is the answer. In everything I’ve read, it stems from that, at least in the shootings and in the crimes we’ve had here in Federal Way.”

Mr. Federal Way and Councilman Moore, apparently, are reading very different things. Mr. Federal Way usually feeds his eyes with “books” and “news,” while Moore evidently spends his time poring studiously over “nothing” and “his gut.” Hwang, for his part, showed incredible restraint. At least in the video of the meeting, there doesn’t appear to be a scene where Hwang leaped onto the dais and throttled Moore while repeating, loudly, the exact words he’d just finished speaking.

On the topic, Mr. Federal Way should reiterate that one box that’s pretty clearly filled with some somethings is the one filled by the the Federal Way Police Department. They’ve completely knocked their role after these tragedies out of the park. They’ve actually been doing things that accomplish actual goals, provide a sense of security to a jittery city, and have been going out of their way to be at public events, including vigils for the victims and community meetings attended by impatient citizens, that say pretty clearly, “We’re here, and we’re seeing this thing through.”

You’re appreciated, Bad Boys. Godspeed in catching the wastes of skin who made Mr. Federal Way write this week’s column in the first place.

Q: Mr. Federal Way, don’t you ever get tired of writing about how much you hate the City Council and the mayor? Because I sure get tired of reading it.

A: Mr. Federal Way beats up on plenty of things outside the council and the mayor. Frequently he wants to tackle a different topic or tomato-pelt a different target, but the civic leaders of Federal Way clearly hate being outside the spotlight for any length of time.

Evidence: Three weeks after declaring that homeless people need to quit being so homeless or get their freeloadin’ selves the heck out of Dodge, and less than a week after half the council agreed that people living in apartments or receiving Section 8 assistance are somehow to blame for good folks getting shot, the council declared May 16-22 “Affordable Housing Week.”

Sometimes, some glorious times when Mr. Federal Way is feeling kind of down on his city and is struggling to think up a joke, things like this come up and he doesn’t even need to bother.

Q: Mr. Federal Way, did you attend the first day of the Federal Way Farmer’s Market?

A: None of your business.

Got something for Mr. Federal Way? Email your questions, complaints and hate mail to mrfederalway@federalwaymirror.com.