@Blair Conrad - Good ideas! I tried to get Chronic running under IronRuby but had some problems with dependencies - I don't know that it's ready yet.
I found a project on Codeplex (DateTimeEnglishParser) that is attempting to do the same thing. It doesn't handle years or time yet, but it's a good start. I've worked on the project a little and contributed a patch to better handle written numbers.
It's an interesting problem, and has definitely helped me understand regular expressions better, so I think I'll keep working on it.
