Even at this morning's city council meeting, Mayor Sam Adams couldn't escape the idiocy of sportswriter John Canzano and his ill-timed rantings about the departure of the Portland Beavers.

Citizen Charles E. Long sat down across from the council and proceeded to read some of the choicer lines from Canzano's Monday Oregonian column into the record, especially passages questioning Adams' leadership heft.

At one point, Adams gave a chuckle. Everyone else kept reviewing notes at their desk, save for Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who held the thinnest of polite smiles.

During a break in the meeting, I caught up with Adams outside the council chambers to ask him what he thought of the contretemps—including yesterday's awkwardness, when Adams called into Canzano's sports-brute talk show and found himself subjected to the worst kind of schoolyard bullying.

Keep reading to see what hizzoner had to say:

"I do a lot of interviews that are contentious," Adams told me.

And then he launched into a defense of his record on baseball: 20 locations reviewed, with three seriously considered: Memorial Coliseum, Lents and Beaverton. In the end, the city wasn't willing to ditch Memorial or make up a $30 million funding gap to see a new stadium erected.

"I involved the whole city," says Adams. "The 11th-hour complaining by folks like John would've been more useful during those discussions."

Adams got in some of his best lines during yesterday's radio show. Canzano raged against things like, oh, urban renewal projects and mass transit, calling them impractical and seemingly backed by "a small circle of elites."

Adams fired back, telling the Bald One he was "beginning to sound like a Tea Party spokesman there."

And, for the record, Adams doesn't think bike lanes are "silly" and that the $613 million figure for the city's bike plan covers 25 years of improvements and would be dwarfed by a similar accounting of infrastructure improvements over the same span. (Update: Original post trailed off after "similar.") He also notes that the aerial tram's cost overruns were mostly paid by its users, not the city.

"My job is also to invest in lives," says Adams.

Of course, everyone should probably just shut the fuck up about all this. And Adams probably shouldn't have called in—taking on a radio shit-talker on his home turf is always no-win—thus fanning the flames of idiocy. Because this clearly is what Canzano wants: our lips and tongues repeatedly caressing the syllables of his name.