Every so often, one of the local media outlets returns to the theme of "The Valley, it's not so bad" and pretends the concept itself isn't kind of old. Today it's The Guide in the LAT, with Adam Carolla serving as celebrity emcee.

Moving to the Valley no longer has the stigma it once did. Carolla's friend just bought a house in Studio City. His comedic cohort Sarah Silverman chose to set her fictional Comedy Central show in Valley Village. And Carolla himself shot most of his semi-autobiographical movie "The Hammer" in Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys and Burbank. Maybe the Valley's days as the butt of porn-star jokes are numbered.

"It's had a renaissance for sure," he says of the Valley, which includes the perennial "up-and-coming" NoHo arts district. Carolla the carpenter actually helped build the now-shuttered Acme Comedy Theatre there in the early 1990s.

Sure, Carolla could afford to live in Beverly Hills (he has been making well over $1 million a year since 1999, his first year on "The Man Show"), but he chooses to live in the Hollywood Hills just minutes away from some of his favorite high school haunts. (Carolla's first apartment as an adult was on Laurel Canyon Boulevard just off Magnolia.)

Carolla also gives his ten favorite Valley restaurants — starting with Du-Par's — and BoingBoing's Mark Frauenfelder gives some of his lesser-known favorite spots. Meanwhile, on the Times' L.A. Now blog, Jesus Sanchez hooks up with an Ohio man who has started a blog remembering his younger days around Van Nuys. Nice shout out to my San Fernando Valley book and website, which has a lot of historic material and references but has gone dormant (due to time constraints) in terms of current postings.