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Me too. I'm guessing the people at wagner.edu where he's hotlinking the 194k image from are highly bothered by it as well.

It amuses me that people think putting irrelevant pictures into their writing makes it "more interesting".

If you want to make a lolcat, just make a lolcat.

There's an art to it. I always found Philip Greenspun's oft-random image placement amusing and tasteful, e.g.

http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/better-living

But the image placement in this story does seem odd and awkward.

I think he takes all the pictures himself.

This doesn't make them more relevant, but they are nicer looking than ads :)

I usually use too-large images in my design nowadays, because I tell them to scale with the page. Thus, when you increase the font size or resize your browser, the image gets larger, but not more pixelated.