fun facts about violin

1. While playing the violin you burn 170 calories an hour!
2. The modern Violin contains over 70 separate pieces of wood.
3. The worlds smallest violin is only 37 millimetres long and is small enough to fit in a box of matches!I would love to try and play that :).
4. An old Italian term for the violin is "kit".
5.An actual news headline: "Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case".
6. Handel was nearly killed in a sword fight at the age of 18.
7. In the movie Titanic, a man with a yellow shirt and a black moustache fell off the boat and drowned. Five minutes later the same exact man was seen playing the violin with two other men.
8. If a violinist is placed into an MRI machine, we can see that a much larger area of the brain - the right primary motor cortex - is devoted to his or her left fingers when compared with a non-violinist. Two or three times as large, in fact. Violinists also have more connections between the two sides of the brain which account for the better co-ordination they have between each hand compared with a non-violin player.
9. Joseph Merlin of Huy, Belgium invented the roller skates. To introduce his invention he entered the ballroom playing violin in 1759. Unfortunately he did not know how to stop and crashed into a full-length mirror, breaking his violin.
10. The violin is the most popular instrument for children, it is also the most in demand instrument at the professional level.11. World record in cycling backwards with violin 60,45 km in 5h 09 min