Here's some untested code:

my %xref = ( 'January'  => "01",
             'Feburary' => "02",
              .
              .
              .
              'December' => "12");
my ($month, $year) = split(/\s+/,$my_input_date);
my $insert_date = $year. "-" . $xref{$month} . "-01";
[download]

MySql will correctly sort by dates stored in date columns without having to do anything special. To reverse the process, do something like:

my %xref2 = ("01" => "January",
             "02" => "Feburary",
             .
             .
             "12" => "December");
my ($year,$month,$day) = split(/-/,$input_date);
my $orig_date = "$xref2{$month} $year";
[download]

Hope this helps.

/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"