This update, from the hot WCGREEN, gives all the details our people love. Wouldn't you agree?

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Everyone knows about Senator Lautenberg: son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, hero of WWII, served in the Army Signal Corps in WWII, founded ADP, elected to five terms in the U.S. Senate, banned smoking on airplanes, pushed the national drinking age to 21. Here's what happened to honor him after he died of viral pneumonia at age 89:

Flags were lowered to half-staff in the Capitol and over the White House after, and his desk on the Senate floor was covered with a black drape and vase of white roses.

Mr. Lautenberg's funeral at the Park Avenue Synagogue in the Upper East Side of New York lasted more than two and a half hours and featured more than a thousand attendees and more than twenty eulogies. VP Joe Biden, who spoke second to last, said, "If there's a definition of redundant, I'm it."

From the synagogue, Lautenberg's casket* was taken to the Frank R. Lautenberg Rail Station in Secaucus, NJ. There, his casket was saluted in a Color Guard ceremony attended by former and current New Jersey governors and a hundred other people. Bagpipes wailed as the casket was loaded onto an Amtrak train bound for Washington, D.C.

The next day, members of an Armed Forces Casket Team carried Lautenberg's casket up the east stairs of the Capitol Building and into the Senate chamber, where it was placed on the Lincoln Catafalque, a bier that was built for the coffin of Abraham Lincoln. After a private viewing for family, senators and their staff members, the chamber was opened for public viewing. Only Senators Lautenberg and Robert Byrd of West Virginia have been accorded this honor during the past fifty years. (The caskets of Senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel Inouye were displayed in the Capitol rotunda.)

After being carried from the Capitol building to a hearse by another Armed Forces Casket Team, Sen. Lautenberg's casket was taken to Arlington National Cemetery for burial with military honors. The graveside service was private, with reporters and the public kept at a distance. If you're interested, the location of his plot is Section 2, Site 1232-B, just down the hill from the Kennedys.

— WCGREEN

* The news reports mentioned only Sen. Lautenberg's casket. I am assuming his body was in it.

Another lovely update from WCGREEN, who is having a refreshing swim in the pool this year.

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Before Esther Williams swam her way through dozens of films, she counted towels at her local swimming pool. (No child labor laws prevented eight-year-olds from handling terrycloth in public.) She was a U.S. swimming champion (100-meter freestyle) who missed out on the Olympics thanks to WWII. MGM talent scouts spotted her performing in Billy Rose's Aquacade and signed her. MGM considered her so valuable that a $250,000 pool was built for her movies. It was nicknamed Pneumonia Alley because it was not heated. Williams ruptured her eardrums more than once in Pneumonia Alley's 25-foot depths during her MGM career.

Williams' co-stars included Ricardo Montalbán, Fernando Lamas (whom she married), Van Johnson, Howard Keel, and Tom & Jerry. She did her own waterskiing stunts for the film Easy to Love while pregnant with her third child. (Cypress Gardens, where that film was set, built a Florida-shaped pool for the movie.) While filming the movie Thrill of the Romance, Williams almost drowned when the water-logged flannel swimsuit she was wearing dragged her to the bottom of the pool. She was forced to unzip it and swim naked to safety.

When she retired from acting (read that as "she refused a role and MGM forced her out, leaving her career to wither down to nothing"), Williams went into business. She licensed her name to a pool company, organized traveling water shows, produced instructional swimming films for children, and founded a swimwear company that did not use flannel. Williams also served as an advisor for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where synchronized swimming debuted as a competitive sport.

— WCGREEN

From across the ocean comes this superb update from Allezblancs.

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I have a small confession to make. In my list for this year's pool, I described Sir Henry Cecil as an English racehorse trainer. I should have checked first, for he was born in my hometown of Aberdeen and, therefore, definitely not English.

But a racehorse trainer he was, and one of the best. When I was much younger, I liked a little bet on the horses, and the combination of Henry Cecil, trainer, and Lester Piggott, jockey, was hard to oppose in the early 1980s. Ardross won the Gold Cup twice and paid quite a few dividends for me.

All good things come to end and, after Piggott had a dispute with one of Cecil's top owners, Daniel Wildenstein, the trainer had to let Piggott go.

The winners gradually dried up and Cecil's private life became all too public. Despite his indiscretions, he remained hugely popular, and then along came the wonder horse, Frankel.

Henry Cecil, jockey Tom Queally and Frankel

At a time when Cecil had already started his battle with stomach cancer, Frankel won all of his fourteen starts, including nine consecutive Group 1 races, a feat which only one other horse has ever achieved. His trainer was too ill to see most of Frankel's later victories, but he was at York in August 2012 to witness Frankel's penultimate triumph in the Juddmonte International Stakes.

Sir Henry Richard Amherst Cecil is survived by his wife, Jane, and three children from two previous marriages. His father had been killed in action two weeks before Henry was born, and his twin brother, David, died in 2000, also of cancer.

— Allezblancs

Our leader (Gerard Tierney) has written this insightful obit. He and Allen Kirshner and Keister Button and Mo get the hit for 18 points. Nice one.

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I already owe the staff two updates, but I figured I'd get right on this one. If Stefano Borgonovo could write a whole book with his eyeballs, the least I could do, with my two healthy hands and ten functioning fingers, was to knock out a few paragraphs.

He was an attaccante nato, a born striker — as in forward, as in football, as in soccer — and that was the title of the 162-page autobiography he published in 2010, some four years after being diagnosed with ALS, and despite being able to operate a computer only by moving his eyes. I understand no Italian and even less soccer, so I didn't read it.

A professional since the age of 17, Borgonovo played for a bunch of teams I'd never heard of, as well as for Italy (which I immediately recognized as a country), much of the time on loan. He even got loaned back to the team that first loaned him out. Or maybe he was lent. Again, I'm not up on my soccer terms.

Upon going public with his diagnosis in 2008, Borgonovo started a foundation to fight the disease, and he lent his voice to the campaign against doping in his sport. In a world where all we ask from our professional athletes is that they not murder anyone, that's going the extra kilometer.

— Gerard Tierney