Nickelodeon Plans More Days of Play to Defeat Childhood Obesity.....

Burbank, CA-Fresh off this past weekend's Worldwide Day of Play, where a 3-hour block of afternoon programming was replaced with dead air to encourage kids to get outside and work on getting in shape, popular children's television network Nickelodeon announced today that it will be repeating the effort on a weekly basis.

"We at Nickelodeon feel that children need more encouragement to turn off the television and exercise," Nickelodeon president Cyma Zarghami explained. "Our experts tell us that the most effective way of providing this encouragement is by having one of the many channels that kids enjoy go down for three hours right after lunch every Saturday. Kids won't know what to do and their only recourse will be vigorous exercise. The only potential roadblock would be if some evil genius were to invent a device which allows for easy changing of the channels, but our sources put this kind of technology many years in the future. The obesity epidemic will be a non-issue by that point."

Seventh grader Sara Grimble, a fan of such tween oriented programs as Drake and Josh and Zoey 101, revealed that "At first I was like, great, now even Spongebob thinks I'm fat. But then I thought, what a great idea. With this, and the pulling all of their junk food ads, I think that Nickelodeon is really going to make a.....oh, they aren't pulling junk food ads. Well then what the hell is this gonna do!"