There has been a lot of tilting at windmills at Holyrood this week and it has been a windy week.
The Scottish National Party tried it over office expenses, the Scottish Executive tried it over fur farming and the Tories tried it on the issue of freemasons.
And just about everyone tried it over fox hunting.
All of them turned out to be hitting out at targets that were not really there.
The SNP Leader John Swinney thought he had Jack McConnell over a barrel at First Minister's Questions.
He asked him if he would order the auditor general to investigate £40,000 unaccounted for at Fife Council.
It was said to have been given to charity Third Age which had been wound up some years before but which rented an office from the former first minister Henry McLeish.
To loud SNP cheers, Mr Swinney said: "What we've got here is a Labour council giving money to an organisation run by Labour activists, renting office space from a Labour MP.
"The connection is Labour, Labour, Labour and it stinks."
Mr McConnell was on weaker ground though when Mr Swinney came back with a reminder that this week saw the appointment of 12 so-called independent assessors to the appointment panel on quangos, the 114 government agencies that run many of our institutions.
Half of the 12 are Labour supporters, only one of them supports the SNP.
All Mr McConnell could say was that, under new legislation, the assessors would be seen to be independent.
He said: "Each and every assessor appointed in the future will be appointed by an independent commissioner.
"I think that is a significant improvement and one that if he had any decency in him at all, Mr Swinney would recognise and welcome. "
The Conservative Leader David McLetchie spent the beginning of the week in Brussels but he came back for question time keen to put the record straight on the Tory handling of the NHS.
He said: "In 1980 there were 45,551 nurses in Scotland, in 1997 there were 51, 472 and in 2000 there were 51,228.
"The number of nurses went up under the Conservatives, down under Labour.
"And the only thing in health that is going up under Labour is the number of incompetent ministers charged with responsibility for it."
Mr McConnell said Mr McLetchie had distorted the figures.
The best debate of the week was on the Fur Farming Bill.
The problem is there are no fur farms in Scotland at present. There is however a clause in the bill which allows for compensation.
This prompted the Liberal Democrat Mike Rumbles to tease his party colleague, the Rural Development Minister Ross Finnie, about the lack of compensation in the anti-fox hunting bill.
What's the difference he asked? It left Mr Finnie blowing in the wind.
Incidentally, it emerged during the week that the Wild Mammals Bill does not, as everyone believed, outlaw Scotland's 10 mounted hunts.
A series of complicated amendments, moved by the sponsor Mike Watson himself at committee stage, has left a loophole in the law.
Mr Watson and his co-sponsor Tricia Marwick hope to close it quickly with a fresh amendment during the final debate on 13 February.
But, after two years of deliberation on this bill, you can be sure it will lead to yet another row.
The committees have been exciting again this week, more exciting than the chamber in many ways.
Telling point
The Local Government Committee came out against Senate-style hearings for quango appointments.
The health committee successfully deconstructed the man from Forest, the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco.
But the director, Simon Clark, did make the telling point that most of the arguments against tobacco advertising are really arguments against tobacco itself.
So why not ban tobacco? That would cost the Treasury £7.5bn a year in lost tax.
On Tuesday, the Justice Committee opened its doors to a campaigning group that has mounted a demonstration every month outside parliament since last summer, Scotland Against Crooked Lawyers.
They argued that the legal profession's self-regulation is not working and that the Law Society, in particular, needs to be independently supervised.
The Labour backbencher Gordon Jackson QC told them they were tilting at the wrong windmill......"the regulatory body for crooked lawyers is the police".
Finally, the SNP's Tricia Marwick used a meeting of the standards committee to tilt at the freemasons.
Members of parliament, she said, should reveal if they are members of this secret society.
On Friday, this brought a series of revelations from the Tory benches, starting with Keith Harding and followed more reluctantly by Phil Gallie, Jamie McGrigor and Brian Monteith.
But then the Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Scotland Martin McGibbon said it was okay to be open about membership.
The secrecy of centuries was blown away, just like that. Makes you wonder if the windmill was worth fighting to preserve anyway.
In more ways than one, it's been a windy week.