Metadata/system catalog queries...

[J. H.]

I was wondering if there was a way to do metadata/system catalog queries, like say I want to retrieve the names of all the tables in a database which have a column named "blah_seq".
Most recently I used oracle, and in that "system" you could say something like select distinct table_name from all_tab_columns where lower(column_name) = "blah_seq".
I used to do this in Sybase/SQL Server, but I forget that catalog interrogation syntax.
What I'm wondering is how to do this in MySql.
I took a stab at a simpler query (for only one table in MySql like)
select * from (show columns from t_sometable) where field like "%blah%'
and that didn't work either.
Can someone point me to a system catalog interrogation mechanism?
Thank you very much.
-J.