Gold Walls, Bart Simpson, and Eggs in My Head

Musing from my genius co-worker:

On this day in 1554 - Francisco Vásquez Coronado dies without finding the fabled city of gold. This poor guy, along with 300 soldiers and 800 indigenous "volunteers", traipsed across what is now New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and even into Kansas looking for a city with walls made of pure gold. He never found anything except some adobe huts. City walls are typically built for fortification and need to be really solid, right? Didn't they have engineers in 1554? I'm no expert (as if that's ever stopped me from giving my opinion), but gold is very heavy. Do you know how big the footers would have to be to support a city wall made of gold? Me either, but I bet it would be ginormous, and not at all feasible. Coronado's quest has a modern parallel. It's not unlike dragging bunches of soldiers across Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction, except that time the huts were made of stone, but the results were eerily similar. My advice to people who are inclined to go off on epic quests is the same as Homer Simpson gave to Bart, "If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing."

I hope an animal never bores a hole in my head and lays its eggs there because I might think I have a good idea but its really just the eggs hatching. (Jack Handey)