Get posts from specific category in dated order

Hi all,

I am doing a custom wordpress design that has 3 columns on the front page. Yeah, 3 columns I know…why did I pitch this design again?

Anyway, I need to get the 6 latest posts from a specific category and display them on the page in a 3 column 2 row layout. I need the posts which appear in the 3rd column to get a special class which clears their right margin.

Any ideas on how to best do this? I was thinking the easiest way for me would be to forget about the loop and just get the 6 latest posts from that category individually, but is there a way to do this? For example get the latest post, then get the one after that, then the one after that, but individually, not in a loop. That way I can put them inside of divs which have custom classes.

I suspect there must be some PHP magic that will do this. I’ll keep searching in the mean time.