KEY POINTS:
Being a normal hot-blooded male, I must confess an email I received last week sent my pulse racing. It read: "Dear Lincoln, I love your columns. I was a Playboy Playmate, and you can Google me to confirm. I would be happy to give you a great story, and you can accompany them by taking a photographic spread".
I contacted the writer and took her up on her offer. We met at her house, where she introduced herself as Cirsten Weldon, a Singapore-born Chinese American, who wants to be a New Zealand resident.
She left Singapore to live in the US when she was 15, where she made her money working in the Hollywood adult magazine, television and B-movie circuit.
Weldon did get roles in shows such as The Cosby Show, but her biggest part was a brief sex scene in the back of a car for Oliver Stone's movie The Doors.
Still, the opportunities she had in America were enough to make her millions - enough for her to move into property investment and start an interior design business.
Apart from her replies to who, how, where and all the other questions that I as a journalist would normally ask, what intrigued me were her thoughts and comments on Auckland.
Her perspective of the City of Sails, which she described as paradise several times during the interview, was often quite different from what I am used to hearing. After living in America for almost 30 years and as a regular visitor to Singapore where she still has her family ties, Weldon was familiar enough with both countries to make comparisons.
I have never heard anyone refer to Auckland house prices as dirt cheap, or describe the traffic as a breeze.
Although Auckland was ranked as the 21st least-affordable city in which to buy a house, Weldon comes from LA - which according to the same survey was the world's least-affordable city.
We strolled to her nearby east coast beach. Once there, she seemed disgusted I didn't gush over how great it was. She tells me how it compares with beaches like Santa Monica: "Lincoln, you cannot swim in most of our beaches. They have bacteria-infested waters. You don't see kids swimming like they do here."
We talked about crime and she said Auckland was "a zillion times safer than LA", where there is no gun control and where the streets are just filled with drugs and violence.
Singapore may be safer, but its draconian laws can make living there stifling. Even Playboy magazine is banned.
She insists house prices in Auckland are still cheap if you compare them with the lifestyle on offer, rather than people's incomes. She asked how you can put a price on a piece of paradise.
Maybe Weldon spoke so well of Auckland because she is new here, but for someone like me, whose job requires me to look at policies, crime and everything that happens here, Auckland's imperfections are sometimes magnified.
So it was refreshing to see Auckland as someone new does. I thought she could be a wonderful ambassador.
Word of mouth is perhaps one of the most effective marketing tools. Air New Zealand's latest marketing strategy involved inviting popular Chinese movie stars to New Zealand in the hope that they will spread the word on their weblogs about New Zealand's greatness.
How much more effective it could be if such sentiments came from the heart - and not the result of a pay cheque.
But saying anything good about Auckland seems to be something very un-Kiwi like.
Working on a project in Christchurch with an architect, Dave from New York, a few years ago, I saw how aggressive Americans can be on insisting that you like their city.
Dave went on about how much more happening Central Park was compared with Christchurch's Hagley Park, how the city's lattes were better, and how much more accepting they were of ethnic minorities.
Auckland does not have a recognisable "I love NY"-type logo, nor does it have a rallying slogan like Wellington's "Absolutely positively".
But many people will tell you the city has a lot going for it.
In fact, according to survey by Mercer Human Consulting in London last year, Auckland was ranked the fifth-best city in the world in which to live, on the basis of factors such as political, social, economic, environmental, personal safety and health, education, transport and public services. Sydney was ranked a distant 10th, and Wellington 12th.
For me, Auckland is great because of the variety of food it offers, the big open spaces, the weekend markets, the beaches and, of course, the regatta taking place today, the world's largest single-day regatta.
We don't talk about what we love about Auckland often enough, or tell others what a great city it is.
Perhaps today, on Auckland Anniversary Day, we could make a start by reflecting on the words of the Fred Dagg song, "We don't know how lucky we are, mate".
