The idea is to always have predefined rows at the beginning of a record set.

For example if you have a column:

id
--------
article_1
article_2
article_3

How can I construct a query to return the rows in the order article_2, article_1, article_3?

This is actually a problem I had when working on the articles module for this site.

I wanted the "README" and the "FEEDBACK" articles to always be at the top of the list and the other articles ordered in descending order.

This is what I did:
SELECT * FROM articles ORDER BY id = 1 DESC, id = 2 DESC, id DESC
I also tried:
SELECT * FROM articles ORDER BY id IN (1,2) DESC, id DESC
but that would place article 2 in front of article 1.

In a similar situation, I derived a newid based on the id by padding extra characters in the beginning.
e.g. README, new id was ZZZREADME
and FEEDBACK, new id was ZZYFEEDBACK
and all other's newid was as is.

Following solution NOT tested.

FUNCTION NewId(Id AS Variant) AS Variant
    NewId = id
    IF id = README then
       NewId = "ZZZ" &  id
    end IF
    IF id = FEEDBACK then
       NewId = "ZZY" &  id
    end IF
End FUNCTION
SELECT * FROM articles ORDER BY NewId(id) DESC