Whilst trying to parse differently formatted date strings from rss feeds a pivot found that date.now is overridden by DateJS to return a new date. There was a suggestion, that later proved useful, to use google's rss reader to first clean up the different rss feeds to ensure that they all can be parsed in much the same way.
WRT the google rss canonicalizer, you simply append the rss feed url to a special google url, details here:
http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2005/12/google-reader-api.html