Here’s what you’ll find if you make the trek over to Thal, Austria, according to the BBC:

On display … are [Schwarzenegger's] childhood bed, a motorbike from one of the Terminator films, some of his first dumb-bells, and a copy of the desk he used as governor of California. …

The museum [also] shows the house’s original pit toilet, and a 1950s kitchen, with a washstand and jugs for collecting water.

Are there many people — non-Schwarzenegger-fanatics, that is — who still want to visit Arnold Schwarzenegger’s childhood home after reading that? It seems like many of the artifacts presented there have little to communicate about the man himself, beyond what could be gleaned by looking at them in a photograph; after all, at least one — the desk replica — appears to have bypassed Schwarzenegger’s presence entirely.

It’s not unusual for a childhood dwelling to be turned into a museum; William Shakespeare and George W. Bush are just two figures whose boyhood homes have been memorialized. In those cases, as with many childhood museums, you get a glimpse into the early life of the soon-to-be significant, rather than a peek at the place where anything beyond adolescence was actually accomplished.

Of course, if a historic site can give you a real idea of what it was like to grow up in a particular community, and provide some insight into the life and work of the person you’re interested in, that might be the strongest argument for its existence. Maybe the knowledge that Arnold Schwarzenegger grew up without electricity does shed a different light on his career. But it’s something you could read about in a magazine; is it worth traveling more than a couple of miles to actually see the evidence for yourself? In any case, this BBC footage suggests that the house has electricity today.

As with so many historical properties around the world, much of the fascination with house museums doubtless derives from the ghost-like perceived presence of the historical individual involved: the idea that Flannery O’Connor or Pearl S. Buck or Johnny Cash or Bill Clinton once lived here, ate here, breathed here, slept here. And much of the time, it’s down to the guest to create this experience: an exercise in imagination, rather than real observation.

How and why do these projects endure? Looking for answers, I first tried Victoria Cain, who teaches at New York University’s Museum Studies program; her outlook for the field was not encouraging. “One of the reasons I think you don’t get a whole lot of [experts on house museums] in Museum Studies programs is that it’s a dying field — it’s a dying industry,” she told me, explaining that people who start house museums hoping to boost local tourism often run into the normal problems encountered by small-business owners everywhere: high costs and dwindling demand.

“It will be interesting to see if people who are attempting to found these new house museums — what their time horizon will be,” she added. “Do they see these as short-term projects, designed to provide a jump-start to a particular neighborhood or economy, or do they really think that these are going to last forever? Because there will be a time where no one cares about Arnold Schwarzenegger … And the Schwarzenegger house museum may find itself in a difficult situation.”

Ken Turino, who teaches a course on historic house museums for Tufts’ Museum Studies program and is manager of community engagement and exhibitions for Historic New England, adds of house museums in general: “A story is really important. You have to realize, a lot of historic houses don’t have the original artifacts and family material. … You have to have some compelling story [to draw people in].”

“There has been a tendency to enshrine people with their birthplaces, even if they only were born there and immediately left,” he says of the childhood museum phenomenon in particular. I ask: Are most of these institutions spun out of a cult of personality — simply the product of a following for a particular person? He replies in the affirmative: “Quite frankly, I think a lot of them are.”

Turino doesn’t think the house museum field is “dying,” however. “Yes, there are a lot that are struggling. Are all of them going to make it? Nope. Should all of them make it? Nope. But do I think that there shouldn’t be new house museums? No.”

Whose childhood home would you visit? Have you been to any childhood museums around the country that are particularly informative — or notably disappointing? Let us know in the comments below.

The filing, which Shriver signed nearly two weeks ago, signals an end to a union that brought together a rising film action star and a princess of the Kennedy clan, herself an up-and-coming network newscaster.

Shriver’s filing does not indicate the couple had a premarital agreement.

That means Schwarzenegger’s earnings from a career as a Hollywood megastar, which allowed him to forgo a salary as governor and commute by private jet to Sacramento, likely will be evenly divided with his estranged wife.

Shriver is seeking spousal support but the amount will be determined later, either through a settlement or by a judge. The divorce is expected to be handled mostly behind closed doors.

Economic disclosure forms filed when Schwarzenegger left as California governor in January show he has interests in at least eight entities each worth $1 million or more. An exact tally of his wealth is impossible to calculate.

The forms also show he still retains rights to intellectual property from his days as a fitness guru and movie star.

Several of Schwarzenegger’s biggest hits, including “Predator,” “True Lies” and the blockbuster sequel “Terminator 2″ were made during his marriage to Shriver.

Shriver was an award-winning television journalist but put her career on hold when Schwarzenegger ran for governor.

Her holdings are more modest but are listed in the disclosure as being worth more than $1 million. She is a member of the Kennedy family and a beneficiary of some of its assets in addition to owning rights and royalties from her work as an author, the filings show.

In recent months, she has appeared in videos posted on YouTube in which she talks about stress in her life, the weight of expectations and the search for faith in a troubled world.

Shriver and Schwarzenegger have four children together, including two sons who are still minors. Shriver’s petition seeks joint custody of the teens, who are 17 and 13.

Schwarzenegger’s spokesman Adam Mendelsohn declined comment in an email. Shriver’s attorney Laura Wasser did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment. Her spokesman Matthew DiGirolamo declined comment.

Shriver publicly supported her husband when he ran for elected office, even after the Los Angeles Times reported accusations by several women that they had been groped by the movie star.

Schwarzenegger said he “behaved badly sometimes” and was twice elected to the governorship.

He failed to fix the state’s chronic budget problems and left office in January with an eye toward environmental projects and a return to the big screen.

One of his projects was an animated collaboration with comic book legend Stan Lee titled “The Governator,” but the project was shelved after Schwarzenegger admitted fathering the child out of wedlock. He has disappeared from the public eye in recent weeks and has not announced any plans to resume acting.

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Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/celebritydocket

3. Permanent bachelor of the day: Hugh Hefner, whose fiancée Crystal Harris called off their wedding five days before the duo was due to walk down the isle.

4. Amazing machine of the day: This gel-scooper-upper  doesn’t seem like it would have much of a purpose … until you spill mayonnaise on the floor in the exact shape you would have wanted it on your sandwich! Now who is laughing, Dad?!

5. Dalai Lama fail of the day: An Australian morning show anchor tries to explain a pizza joke to the leader of the Tibetan Buddhists. It does not go over so well.

Yes, maybe the problem was that he should have told the joke in terms of burgers.

“It was as Joseph grew and I started to see the resemblance that I wondered — but it became more apparent as time went on,” said Baena, who said that Maria Shriver also seemed to recognize  Joseph’s similarity to her now estranged husband. Shriver, says Baena, was supportive and eventually asked the housekeeper point blank whether Schwarzenegger was Joseph’s father.

And perhaps the most surprising aspect of the story: When Joseph learned his father’s identity last year, he apparently said, “Cool!” (No doubt, we assume, because he is too young to have witnessed firsthand Schwarzenegger’s acting career play out in “Kindergarten Cop” and “Twins.”)

These days, there’s a new rack of clever, grim headlines for comedians to invent:

“Maria & Arnold: Terminated!”

“IMF head sits in jail, waiting for a bail-out”

Meanwhile, I’m sitting at home, practicing my punditry and wondering why it is that after 36 years with the same woman — with whom I have made love more than 3,000 times — there’s nothing I’d like better right now than to go into the next room to strip off her clothes.

After all, I don’t really have much to say about Arnold and Maria. They’ve asked for privacy; I offer them indifference. I didn’t really know who Maria Shriver was, beyond her name (I don’t follow television news), until her husband ran for governor — and even today, after his two terms in office, I think of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a well-cast actor in a terrific sci-fi movie about robots. Judging from the Wiki versions of their lives — her father founded the Peace Corps, his father was a Nazi; she spends her spare time hugging people with disabilities, he spends his spare time grabbing ass — I find it astounding that they made it to their 25th anniversary.

As for Dominique Strauss-Kahn — like Schwarzenegger, married to a famous television journalist and driven to frenzy by the sight of a housekeeper — his alleged aggression is incomprehensible to me. What satisfaction does a man derive from rape (or, for that matter, hiring a woman for sex)? My own sexuality is so much about my desire to be desired that the thought of sex without reciprocity leaves me limp.

Schwarzenegger, Strauss-Kahn and I are about the same age (I’m the junior one at 59), so I can testify that none of us are testosterone-crazed (unless Arnold’s taking supplements). That’s where our peership ends, however. The two of them are multimillionaires, political bigwigs, media stars, with guys like me in their employ. That means I’ve had every advantage over them in terms of keeping together a long, happy marriage.

It takes a girlie-man to do it.

That’s what Schwarzenegger has been calling his political opponents since he campaigned for George W. Bush in 1988: “girlie-men.” It seems he wasn’t just acting in those “Terminator” films: He is a major-league alpha-ape fool.

Oh, it’s hard to be a girlie-man in this flaunt-and-taunt culture of ours. Quick, name one hit rock ‘n’ roll classic that explicitly celebrates long-term relationships. I can think of exactly one: Orleans’ happy number, “Still the One” (“We’re still having fun, and you’re still the one“), which made it to No. 5 in 1976 — a year that included No. 1 hits like Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” and Johnnie Taylor’s “Disco Lady” –

“If it wasn’t for the girl sittin’ next to me

I’d jump right up and outta my safety seat

You got me hypnotized, soul-mesmerized …”

And quick, name one porn scene (despite the fact that you never watch porn) in which the woman is truly pleasured. The only clips in which that happens involve girl-girl sex or gadgetry. As soon as a man enters the picture, intimacy, parity and female orgasms are banned. The “money shot,” as they call it, is always his orgasm, not hers. He is “ripping off a piece” while she is suffering a nympho-maniacal seizure. That’s the formula. You have to wonder if the titans of porn have even thought about its implicit message: To be used as a scum bucket, a woman should find a man; to get satisfaction, she needs another woman or a machine.

Whew. I’ve looked at these scenes of sex without kissing, without caring, without communion, and all I do is shudder. Is that what men really want? I can’t relate.

I’m a girlie-man.

It took a long while to achieve that status. For years, in fact, my poor wife was convinced that I’d someday renounce the comfort and intimacy of “the girl sittin’ next to me” and be “soul-mesmerized” by some hot Disco Lady. She knew that I sometimes felt frustrated by the sexual boundaries of monogamy; she knew that I would say yes to the right woman in the right situation (the only vow I’d made about having sex with other people was that I would not lie to her about it, neither to her face nor by omission). Therefore it was inevitable, she believed, that I would someday fool around and fall in love.

It took until our own 25th anniversary — as well as two tepid, fully disclosed flings (finally, the right women in the right situations!) — for me to look her full in the face and say: “Hey, you can stop worrying. I’m never going to leave you. Not until I die.”

I had finally reached an age, I explained, at which it might actually feel downright weird to get naked and share kisses and bodily fluids with a stranger. Certainly I could never match with another woman the level of trust, intimacy and freedom that she and I have in the sack. “It’s like, the longer we’re together,” I said, “the more like virgins we become.”

Virgins, indeed: sharing a bed, a refrigerator, a toilet bowl, for 36 years; sharing the mutual benefit of our successes and the mutual “oh, well” of our disappointments; sharing the incredible good fortune of having a person who really cares, knows, hears and sees; sharing a life in partnership, both of us made stronger and braver by our hand-holding.

Now, that’s the woman I want to make love with! C’mere, you!

Maybe strange flesh would still tempt me, but it barely ever passes through my field of vision: I’m a busy writer living in the country, where I see more squirrels than human beings in the course of any given week. Besides, what woman in her right mind would want to have a fling with me (notwithstanding my dimples)? I don’t represent danger or adventure, I don’t have bulging biceps, a motorcycle, a private jet, or a big roll of bills — and I’m famous only for my happy marriage.

And I’m so out of practice at groping! — first, because I need to be groped before I will grope, and second, because once a man learns to see women first as human beings, second as sex objects, it becomes difficult to reverse the order.

That learning took me years to accomplish — to lose enough of my vanity and my egotism, to feel some slackening of testosterone’s grip, to raise a beloved daughter to the age at which I met her mother, and to rewrite a few punch lines. Not:

Marriage is the process of finding out what kind of man your wife would have preferred.

Rather,

Marriage is the process of becoming the kind of man your wife can keep loving.

But bless my soul, I’m a girlie-man at last.