Vertical alignment of text in a line with a picture in it

[alon]

What I would like to do is have a line of text with an in-line picture
pasted in somewhere in the middle of the line. The problem is that
text is always vertically aligned at the bottom of the picture, when I
want it to be in the center. For a graphical representation (I hope
this looks right on your screen):

picpic
texttext picpic texttext
I want it to look like: picpic



What it looks like: picpic
picpic
texttext picpic texttext

I know I can do something similar with tables and cells, but is there
no way to make this happen in-line?

Thanks,
Alon