What was going on when I was born?

Todd Blackledge and Curt Warner combined on a 48-yard touchdown pass early in the fourth quarter today and sparked Penn State to an 11-point rally and a 24-14 victory against Notre Dame. The triumph also pointed the Nittany Lions in the direction of the Sugar Bowl. Notre Dame tried valiantly to come up with its second straight major upset, but was hampered by the loss of its starting quarterback, Blair Kiel, who left the game after the Irish's seventh play on offense. Nevertheless, the Irish led, 14-13, at halftime on a touchdown pass by a substitute quarterback, Ken Karcher, and a 93-yard kickoff return by Allen Pinkett, the freshman tailback.

THE Long Island Lighting Company, nearing completion of its controversial $3 billion nuclear power plant at Shoreham, has proposed a new way for customers to pay for it that would increase electric bills by 50 percent over the next three years. This ''rate moderation plan,'' as Lilco calls it, would average out heavy start-up costs in the first year or two of plant operation and then theoretically would hold down rate increases after the threeyear period. Lilco estimates that by 1986 it will begin showing a saving on Shoreham, which should then begin to pay for itself. Lilco contends that over the 30-year life of the nuclear power plant there should be a saving of $16 billion, compared with what the cost would be to abandon the project or to build a coal-fired plant to generate an equivalent amount of electricity. Consumer groups, meanwhile, are insisting that when Lilco proposed the nuclear plant it had asserted that itwould pay for itself. Therefore, they insist that Lilco put the plant in operation with a zero rate increase.

WHILE many Long Island hospitals are trying to expand their facilities to make room for new beds, they are apparently not heeding the second opinion of a regional health agency that is insisting that the Island as a whole has ample beds to meet population needs through 1985. Daniel T. McGowan, the executive director of the Nassau@/Suffolk Health Systems Agency, a governmental organization responsible for evaluating all applications for hospital capital expenditures, said that Nassau County will have 69 more beds than it needs in 1985 while Suffolk County will need 167 more beds. To determine the numbers, the agency used a complex formula that took into account such factors as age and density of population, hospital admissions and medical procedures. One of the main reasons for the discrepancy between what the agency foresees for the Island and the current situation is a temporary population ''bulge'' among older patients. Many hospitals have been forced to keep patients in their beds who properly belong in nursing homes. This has forced a long wait, in some cases several months, for patients who need surgery.

WHETHER you are a landlord or a homeowner, there are risks with t enants that cannot be avoided. Even if you carefully select your t enant, even if you check and double check all references, even if y ou rent to a friend, you may still wind up with a damaged property. The repair bills will certainly make you angry and probably will make you question your own judgment about people. And there are only a few practical steps you can take to lessen your losses: You can demand a security deposit; you can set the rent high enough to cover excessive wear or malicious carelessness; you can sue and you can write off part of the loss as a tax deduction. But each of these steps has limitations.

THE Gold Rush of the 1980's is the push for high technology - the Open Sesame, it is said, to jobs and prosperity. But in New Jersey, people are asking whether the state's business climate is conducive to high-level prospecting. It is important that the climate be the right one, they say, because the race is on. Whether high technology fulfills the promise, as economists predict, or turns out to be merely a fad, as detractors claim, states are competing against states, nations against nations and companies against companies.

YONKERS THIS city's school system has offered to ''buy back'' from its teachers their unused days off for illness and personal reasons, paying the money into Individual Retirement Accounts it would establish for those teachers. The voluntary program, designed to reduce teacher absenteeism and the backlog of accumulated days off, was described last week by one state education official as ''novel'' and by the head of the teachers union as ''very positive.'' Each of the 1,553 classroom and support staff teachers in Yonkers is allowed under union contract 12 sick days and three personal days off, with full pay, each year. These days may be carried over from one year to the next.

Some Turnaround A not-so-funny thing is happening to the economy on its way to a turnaround. Of six leading indicators due out in the next two weeks, only two - housing and after-tax corporate profits - are likely to show improvement. For example, according to Merrill Lynch, industrial production is expected to decline 0.7 percent in October from the previous month. Producer prices in October will likely repeat the 0.6 percent gain of July and August. (Merrill Lynch considers the index's September 0.1 percent decline an aberration caused by large automotive dealer rebates and discounts.)

From 1892 until 1931, a small factory on Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City, Queens, turned out terra cotta ornaments for 2,000 New York City buildings, some of them now landmarks, such as the Plaza Hotel and Carnegie Hall. Itself a showcase of the king of work that the New York Architectural Terra Cotta Company could do, with its elaborate doorway decorations and decorative insets, the factory was designated a landmark last August despite the opposition of its current owner, Citibank.

DURING Leonid I. Brezhnev's years of failing health, the old men in the Kremlin had plenty of time to prepare for the end. Last week, when the 75-year-old Soviet leader died, the gerontocracy moved swiftly to prolong its grip on power. Yuri V. Andropov, 68, who had kept dossiers on everybody for 15 years as head of the K.G.B., took over Mr. Brezhnev's base as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

WHEN Lewis Faccinto moved to Litchfield from California earlier this year, he was somewhat troubled because the house he had chosen for himself, his wife and three young children was served by a private well, as were most of the homes in that part of the state. Mr. Faccinto, an engineer with Winchester Electronics in Oakville, decided to have the well water tested. ''I wanted to be sure there was adequate water and whether it was good water,'' he said. By doing so, Mr. Faccinto joined a growing number of homeowners in Connecticut who rely on private wells and have the water tested, either before buying the property or at regular intervals afterward. Health officials have also begun developing new programs to safeguard those supplies. Previously, protection and monitoring of public water systems had been emphasized.

Security was tightened today on the eve of the funeral of Leonid I. Brezhnev as this city prepared to receive what is likely to be the largestgathering of foreign leaders in Soviet history. A cordon around the center of Moscow was tightened. Except for a milelong line of organized mourners and for official cars headed for the House of Unions, where the body lies in state, no one was allowed past soldiers and policemen standing shoulder-to-shoulder on every boulevard, street and alley. Hotels near the center were cleared of guests in preparation for the influx of the foreign delegations. Newspapers published appeals to anyone without real need to stay out of Moscow.

CONNECTICUT, ''The Meteorite State.'' That might be an appropriate, albeit unlikely, choice to replace ''The Nutmeg State'' or ''The Constitution State'' as a state nickname, but as far as some scientists around the country were concerned last week, Connecticut can claim a unique relationship with outer space. While convinced that a meteorite did indeed plunge through the roof of the home of Robert and Wanda Donahue on Church Street in Wethersfield at about 9:20 P.M. Monday, Dr. Ursula Marvin, a geologist with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., said that such an occurrence was ''really rather impossible.'' It was not that a meteor fell to earth, which occurs every so often, said Dr. Marvin, nor that it fell through somebody's roof, which has happened in 11 known incidents since 1847.