People Movers

The way we humans try to legitimize things we do through categorization and names has always intrigued me. For example, there is this neighborhood by my house which has a big stone sign saying that the neighborhood is called "Venetian Villas" or something to that effect. Looking past the fact that the neighborhood is actually located in the Western U.S.--Orem, Utah to be exact--one can ask why we would feel this impulse to "borrow" the Venetian heritage.
What was my surprise then, when, traveling for the first time to the great state of Alaska, I meet this phenomenon, but going in the opposite direction. I had just hopped off my flight from Seattle to Anchorage with my traveling companion Andrew Christensen, and, having a few hours before our flight to Fairbanks, we decided that we wanted to see downtown Anchorage. We approached a friendly-looking police officer directing traffic and asked him if he knew where the buses to downtown Anchorage were. He looked at us kind of puzzled for a second and replied, "Oh, you mean the people mover. It is right over there." After recovering from this perplexing response, we proceeded to the before-mentioned location and we awaited the "people mover." Unfortunately we did not get to utilize the "people mover" due to time constraints, but we did consider taking a "personal people mover" (taxi), but eventually we decided on staying at the airport and eating before getting on the "flying people mover" to Fairbanks.
So basically I didn't realize that the great post-modernist movement has found a state that is committed to applying its principles in everyday life. We surely can't avoid categorizing, but we can simplify and render harmless our classifications as the Alaskans are finding out with their "people movers" (unless you are an Alaskan caribou who is left out of the picture with 'people' being in the title).