* Sing along: The halls of the...

* Sing along: The halls of the U. S. Embassy in Prague will soon be filled with the sound of music. Shirley Temple Black, child film star and America’s new ambassador to Czechoslovakia, plans to form a singing group to help brighten the lives of embassy personnel, who are barred from socializing with most Czechs, Newsweek magazine reports in its Oct. 30 issue.

* Trick or treat: To complete that scary Halloween costume, a Dallas optometrist has designed glow-in-the dark contact lenses. Dr. John Herron colors the lenses by dipping them into commonly used ophthalmic dyes. After treatment, the dyes become florescent green and red in the dark. “You’ll be weird,” Herron promised. “But the rest of the world looks like it really is.”

* They like Ike: Gettysburg, Pa., plans a yearlong commemoration of former President Dwight Eisenhower’s 100th birthday. His grandson and biographer, David Eisenhower, approves, saying, “My granddad lived many places, 37 in all. But he chose to come to Gettysburg. . . . It’s the place where he was the most vivid person that I knew. It was the place where he felt natural and at home.” President Eisenhower worked at the Gettysburg College after he left office and lived on a farm outside of town. He died in 1969.

* Fish tale: Organizers for an eight-hour state bass federation fishing contest in North Carolina have excluded Sue Rakes, partly because they say male anglers want privacy if they need to answer nature’s call. Rakes rejects that argument. “I take my fishing seriously, and I deserve the same opportunities as the males,” she said in Eden, N.C. She qualified for the event by finishing 18th out of 122 fishermen in a regional contest.