[Custom loop] Pulling posts by category into pages

I’m trying to create a series of pages that also pull posts in. I’ve gotten that far — the next step is that I’d like to have those posts be pulled by category. The trick is that I’d like a page to pull posts matching the the same category as the title.

Example: A page with a title of “Ships” would pull in all posts with category of “Ships” … I know I could do this with a custom template for each page, but I’m trying to learn more PHP the “right” way. Here’s a snippet of relevant code:

<?php $temp_query = $wp_query; ?>
<?php $page_temp = the_title(); ?>
<?php query_posts("category_name='$page_temp'&showposts=1"); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
  <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
  <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
 <div class="entry">
   <?php the_content('Read more &raquo;'); ?>
 </div>
	</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Site I’m developing is at http://test.fireflyrpg.com