This happened last night, on TV. Let's just get into it.

1:39: Pinch your pointer finger against your thumb, bend out your elbows and shake those hips.

Also known as the "gettin' loose" move. Used by pretty much every female singer who ever sang a Motown song. Perfected by Aretha, who uses it in the following clip, at 0:16.

By way of eulogy to the dying animal that is the Diva, my crack team of consultants, statisticians and graphic designers have assembled DIVA-OFF 2010, a highly scientific (we used computers!) evaluation of the greatest divas of the past twenty-five years. A list of divas was evaluated on eleven levels of diva-ness, and, because each diva characteristic is not created equal, we scaled the values in the hopes of creating an aggregate diva number that will serve as a reference point for future generations.

Here is why we needed to do this. On April 14, 1998, at the Beacon Theater in New York City, VH1 put on a [...]